Category: Radio New Zealand

Source: Radio New Zealand

A Dunedin bar owner has surrendered liquor licences for two venues after a drunk patron was locked in at the end of the night.

The 3 April lock-in at DropKicks on Great King Street led to a district licensing committee hearing to determine if operator Femme Enterprises Limited, which was owned by Rebecca Ellis, was fit to hold a liquor licence.

The business had been granted a temporary authority to sell alcohol in February.

A committee report said the patron, who was in a toilet stall, was locked in after staff failed to properly check the venue before they left.

The person was found “extremely intoxicated” and taken to hospital after they called friends for help, who alerted police.

At the start of the hearing on 5 May, Ellis voluntarily gave up temporary authority for DropKicks and another bar Errick’s on Crawford Street.

A meeting minute released on Monday showed the committee paused proceedings to explain that new operators could still get temporary authorities, giving Ellis a chance to reconsider her decision, but she said it was the “right thing to do”.

In a post on social media last week, DropKicks apologised to customers and people who had upcoming bookings.

“Thanks to everyone who has come and enjoyed DropKicks as much as we do,” the post said.

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand

Source: Radio New Zealand

Explainer – The internet is filling with panic about hantavirus, but is it really as dangerous as Covid-19? Here’s what we know so far.

Three deaths and several infections on a cruise ship off South America has raised alarms for many, in a world where some are still mentally and physically recovering from the Covid-19 pandemic.

“This is not going to be another coronavirus pandemic, from all we know about this agent,” said epidemiologist Michael Baker – a man who knows his pandemics and was one of New Zealand’s most prominent experts during Covid-19.

“This is not another Covid,” World Health Organisation Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has also said. “The current public health risk from hantavirus remains low.”

What’s happening with this outbreak? Could it come to New Zealand?

Three people have died and at least six others appear to be infected after an outbreak of hantavirus on the cruise ship MV Hondius, which was travelling around South America last month.

Passengers on the cruise ship have been evacuated in the Canary Islands. One New Zealander has been confirmed to be among them.

That person will eventually return home.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade confirmed that “we are providing consular assistance to a New Zealander on board the MV Hondius. This will include repatriation assistance.”

MFAT indicated no further information on the New Zealander would be provided for privacy reasons.

“We currently have no reason to believe that any New Zealanders have contracted hantavirus,” said Dr Richard Jaine, deputy director of public health for the Ministry of Health.

“However, it is important that we respond appropriately and take all possible steps to manage any potential risk to individuals or the public.”

The person may likely face precautions on their return to New Zealand.

“Depending on the risk it is possible this may also include a period of quarantine for any exposed individual on their return to New Zealand.”

What is a hantavirus?

Hantavirus is typically spread by the inhalation of contaminated rodent droppings.

This particular strain, the Andes virus, is endemic to Argentina, and is the only strain of hantavirus that has been known to have human to human transmission – typically through very close contact such as sharing a bed or food.

Its symptoms typically include fever, headache, muscle aches and gastrointestinal symptoms.

Hantavirus cardiopulmonary syndrome (HCPS), a severe respiratory illness that can develop, has a case fatality rate up to 50 percent. It’s the same thing that killed Betsy Arakawa, the wife of the late actor Gene Hackman, last year.

“The (hantavirus) in the Americas are particularly dangerous because they have a fatality rate of about 40 percent,” Baker told RNZ Afternoons. “They’re very unpleasant infections if you get them.”

No vaccines or specific treatments exist for hantavirus, but quick hospital care can often prevent symptoms turning deadly.

Hantaviruses are found in small mammals such as rats, mice, voles, shrews and lemmings, but no New Zealand rodents carry these viruses, University of Auckland associate professor of infectious diseases Dr Mark Thomas said.

“The only way a New Zealand resident could become unwell with a hantavirus infection would be as the result of travel to a country where the virus is present.”

WHO has said the investigations so far suggest possible exposure to rodents during bird watching activities.

“A Dutch couple, who unfortunately have now died, probably got infected in Argentina, and the other thing that was very bad luck was that the Andean species of this hantavirus is the only one that has occasionally caused person to person transmission,” Baker said.

How is it transmitted?

Hantavirus is contracted from direct contact with urine, droppings or saliva of infected rodents, or rarely through rodent bites.

But the Andes variant has shown some ability to move between humans in certain conditions.

“Andes virus has demonstrated limited human-to-human transmission in previous outbreaks, typically occurring among close contacts and within household settings, generally requiring prolonged close exposure,” WHO’s database states.

However, Covid-19 is a far more efficient airborne respiratory virus that spreads much easier than hantavirus does.

Human-to-human transmission of hantavirus is rare and requires prolonged and direct exposure to a case, Jaine said.

“This isn’t like the flu or Covid-19.”

Cruise ships have often been incubators for diseases and outbreaks.

Baker said the combination of the Andes hantavirus and cramped quarters on board a ship have made for a “really bad sequence of events”.

“The ship environment presents an increased risk due to close living quarters, shared indoor spaces, prolonged exposure, and frequent interpersonal interactions, all of which may facilitate transmission,” WHO wrote.

Health authorities in several countries have also been tracking passengers who had already disembarked and anyone who may have come into contact with them.

The lengthy incubation time of the virus – as long as eight weeks – could also complicate efforts to contain the disease.

So is this really going to be Covid-19 part 2?

The general consensus for now is that while it’s worrying and health authorities are paying close attention, this isn’t the same kind of quick-spreading disease Covid was.

“It has all those echoes from a very tough period in our history,” Back said, with an infection that’s come from an animal to humans. But it’s not the same kind of illness.

“It’s very different. They’re usually very hard to catch. There are several hundred cases a year but they are linked to rodents.”

The images of masked medical workers and return of contract tracing is bringing back memories of the pandemic for many people. “Covid PTSD” is a real thing, with people anxious about a return to lockdowns and cracking dad jokes on social media about stocking up on toilet paper.

Is there any danger of it turning into a global pandemic?

So far, the advice is not to panic.

“This is not the start of an epidemic. This is not the start of a pandemic,” Dr Maria Van Kerkhove, director of WHO’s Department of Epidemic and Pandemic Management, said at a press conference.

“I think it’s very important that listeners are not overly concerned about this particular outbreak … It is being very well managed,” Baker said.

Viruses do mutate, so health authorities are taking the hantavirus situation very seriously, Baker said.

“They’ll certainly be looking at it to see if it has changed in any way.”

For the passengers on the ship, “precautions being taken are very intense,” he said.

“Anyone being evacuated is going to be treated as if they are quite infectious.”

WHO’s emergency alert and response director Abdi Rahman Mahamud told AFP he believed any further spread would be “a limited outbreak” if “public health measures are implemented and solidarity shown across all countries.”

WHO has said it advises against implementing any travel or trade restrictions based on current information about the hantavirus.

The majority of the approximately 150 passengers and crew on board the cruise ship appear not to have contracted the virus.

“If it was highly infectious it wouldn’t just be maybe half a dozen people infected on this ship,” Baker said.

“You’d see a high proportion of people on board showing some evidence of infection.”

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand

Source: Radio New Zealand

A West Auckland foodbank says demand for its services has reached its highest-ever levels.

Waitakere Community Outreach foodbank coordinator Victor Davies, who has been running food banks for 26 years, told Morning Report the organisation has never been busier than it is now.

“When I first started, people were asking for food parcels, approximately 10 times a week. Now the number has gone up to 50 a week. We’re doing over 200 a month.

“I call them the working poor. You’ve got two people working, and they still can’t make ends meet. And a lot of people out there really are on struggle street,” he said.

Davies said food was the first thing to go when bills needed to be paid.

“It is the exorbitant rent that people pay. And don’t forget, they have to pay the rent, their electricity, everything else on top of that. And so to me, the last thing on the list is food.”

He said one home he delivers food to has two large families living together under one roof, just to pay the bills.

Ministry of Health figures from November 2025 revealed one in five children live in a household where food runs out.

Those numbers were higher in the Pacific community, where 44.3 percent lived in households where food ran out often or sometimes. That figure was 32.3 percent for Māori children.

This compares to 18.3 percent of children who responded to the survey as European or other, and 13.2 percent for Asian children.

Davies said the cost of living was also resulting in people no longer being able to pay their rent.

“People can’t afford rent, they get evicted. They’ve got to look for something else. They’re actually couch surfing, so they move from one accommodation to the other,” Davies said.

“I don’t think, quite honestly, there is an answer to this. I really don’t.

“We’ve created a society now with a very big divide, a big ravine where you’ve got the very wealthy at the top, you’ve got the bottom. We’ve created a poor, working class society, even though you’re working. And some people are working two or three jobs just to make ends meet.

“I don’t know where people would be if we didn’t have food banks. I really don’t,” Davies said.

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Source: Radio New Zealand

Major research to test whether lowering the ocean’s acidity could help to fight climate change will get underway in Hawke’s Bay on Tuesday.

Over the next three weeks, New Zealand and Canadian researchers will use a small fleet of boats and watercraft to sample and map the chemistry of coastal waters in the region, especially around river mouths.

The voyage is part of a five-year, $11 million Endeavour Fund project, led by Earth Sciences New Zealand (ESNZ), to research the potential of several marine carbon dioxide removal (mCDR) techniques.

The ocean is already a massive natural carbon sink, but mCDR aims to draw extra carbon dioxide out of the rapidly warming atmosphere and lock more of it away in the deep ocean.

It has therefore attracted growing interest over the last decade or so, but many of the techniques – which involve adding things to the ocean to stimulate carbon removal – are only at a theoretical or lab testing stage.

ESNZ marine biogeochemist Cliff Law said that was partly because of how difficult it was to prove that any of them worked.

“When things spread in the ocean, it’s very difficult to actually have instruments in place to monitor it, because obviously the ocean’s a big wide place and it disperses quite randomly.”

There are also concerns about what effects marine carbon dioxide removal might have on the marine environment, which have driven a growing body of international law to restrict how the techniques are researched and deployed.

RNZ reported earlier this year on the international start-up Gigablue, which has attracted scepticism from some marine science experts over plans to carry out its own type of mCDR in New Zealand waters.

Instead of deliberately deploying any mCDR techniques, the ESNZ research would instead study their naturally-occurring equivalents, Law said.

Hawke’s Bay was the proving ground for the first of three processes, called ocean alkalinity.

“Alkalinity has been going into the oceans for millions and millions of years through things like rivers and from sediments,” he said.

“It provides a natural mechanism by which it offsets the acidity of the water. So in other words, it raises the pH and it absorbs the carbon dioxide, and it converts that into a dissolved form, which is no longer carbon dioxide, so it can’t be exchanged with the atmosphere.”

Rather than deliberately adding alkalinity to the ocean, the team would test how much carbon dioxide was being taken up as a result of Hawke’s Bay’s many rivers disgorging alkaline sediments and groundwater into the ocean.

“The reason why we looked in this region first of all was that we knew that there were limestone catchments and they tend to release more alkalinity into the fresh water,” Law said.

Canadian scientists would use ESNZ’s launch, Kimiora, to set a moored buoy with sensors, and would also operate an unmanned surface craft around the plume of water entering the bay from the Esk River.

“It’ll be mapping the surface waters and making measurements of… the carbon dioxide and the pH in the water, and from that, we can calculate the alkalinity.”

Further offshore, the ESNZ research vessel Tangaroa would move around southern Hawke’s Bay, Law said.

“We will be mapping the alkalinity, the salinity and the other things that will be indicators of the river input in the surface water. But we’ll also be making measurements throughout the water column.”

The team also planned to use an autonomous ‘glider’ craft that would move independently around the bay, collecting further measurements, including from the seafloor.

That would help the researchers to measure the effects of increased alkalinity on the marine environment, he said.

“If alkalinity has increased, what effect does it have on things like the phytoplankton and the sediments [on the seafloor]?”

ESNZ had already developed a good model of how river water and the alkalinity it carried mixed with the ocean, he said.

“The information we’ll get on this voyage will allow us to use the observations… to actually develop our measurements and our models.”

Later stages of the research would study natural equivalents for ocean fertilisation – when nutrients are added to the ocean to stimulate the growth of carbon-absorbing phytoplankton – and how much extra carbon can be stored if wood is deposited on the seafloor.

Rather than deliberate ocean fertilisation, the team would study what happened during a natural algal bloom, Law said.

“We’ll have a voyage in coming years down there to measure one of these phytoplankton blooms and measure the amount of carbon that’s falling out below it – how much is actually sequestered away in the deep ocean and where it goes.”

To study the effect of wood deposits, the team would look at the forestry slash that ended up on the seafloor in Hawke’s Bay because of Cyclone Gabrielle.

“We can look at how much of the carbon is still there and how much has been lost and how it’s impacted the biological communities in the sediment around it.”

Unlike the other two techniques, ocean alkalinity was a chemical process, making it slightly easier to monitor and measure, Law said.

“The real trouble with a lot of the biological marine CDR techniques is tracking the carbon, what its fate actually is, how much of it is going to get down into the deep ocean and be sequestered away for a long time?”

There were “all sorts of problems” with that.

“It can be broken down by feeding by animals and by bacteria, and it can be converted not only back into carbon dioxide quite quickly, but it can also be converted into other forms of carbon, which makes it difficult to monitor and measure and follow.”

Alkalinity, on the other hand, was a more straightforward chemical conversion of carbon dioxide into forms like bicarbonate.

“We know that it’s fairly stable in those forms for long periods of time – longer than 1000 years.”

The full research project aimed to answer important questions about what might happen if marine carbon dioxide removal did go ahead in future, Law said.

“What do we need to know? What are the risks? What are the benefits of these things? How will they impact ecosystems and the ocean’s chemistry? How much carbon dioxide could be removed? How do we actually monitor and verify them?”

That would help to inform New Zealand’s ministries and government “about whether this is an appropriate thing for us to be doing or not”, he said.

“If we were to go down this line, what do we need to know? What regulations do we need in place before we can even consider deploying something in our waters?”

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