By BRIAN RUDMAN
I don't doubt Professor Peter Gluckman is a brilliant man. But you do have to wonder if he hasn't got his priorities a little askew. Recently, he was back astride his old hobby-horse, demanding more state funding for the esoteric realms of his medical research.
He wants the cash to help build up his research team at Auckland University. Such a centre of excellence would not only create wealth, he says, it would also help reverse the brain drain out of New Zealand. Both are worthy aims, no doubt. But surely a higher priority for scarce medical funds is in providing basic community health to all Aucklanders.
The experimental work on brain cell death that the Gluckman team is involved with certainly sounds impressive. But is it really more important than trying to cure what the professionals - Professor Gluckman amongst them - call the Third World state of child health in places like South Auckland?
To me, diverting scarce health funds into luxuries like pure research seems as misguided as the North Koreans and Indians building missile systems, while millions of their citizens live in abject poverty.
In his inauguration lecture as professor of paediatrics, 12 years ago, Professor Gluckman strongly criticised the state of child health here. "Relative to other comparable societies, our children are sicker and get poorly treated." He said the problem in the non-Pakeha population was urgent. The rate of rheumatic fever was as high as in India.
There are no indications that anything has improved in the intervening years. The headlines paint a grim picture. Tuberculosis is spreading because of poverty and treatment failures. Central Auckland has 23.7 cases per 100,000 population compared to Australia's 5.47. In infant mortality, we've slipped from sixth lowest amongst OECD countries in 1960 to 21st out of 22 in 1996.
In Auckland, we're in the tenth year of a meningitis epidemic which has killed, nationwide, at least 142. Rates of infection are 10 times higher than in the United States and four times higher than in Australia and England. Whooping cough, measles and campylobacter are also rife.
The World Health Organisation capped off this depressing picture recently, ranking our health system 41st in the world, behind countries like Morocco and Costa Rica.
Even basic health care is being neglected for want of money. Glue ear, a physical condition that impairs hearing and can lead to severe social, learning and emotional problems, is a good example. In South Auckland, the backlog for the simple procedure required to treat the condition was more than a year long. It took a campaign by the local paper, which raised $42,000 for special surgical clinics, to get the waiting list cleared.
Professor Gluckman has honed his fund-raising skills over the years. He pushes all the right buttons, promising us entry to the "knowledge economy" through his institute and warning of Third World spectator status if we fail to take up his offer. Like neuroscientist whizz-kid Professor Matthew During before him, he is simultaneously derisory of local funding while, in the same breath, offering the sort of prospectus come-ons not seen in this country since the stock-market boom of the 1980s.
To an old cynic like myself, what is happening is that the Government is being asked to pick "winners" in the lottery that is medical research, and to bet on them heavily.
We all know that having a flutter at the casino can be fun. But Professor Gluckman wants us in the high-rollers room betting seriously. Of course he reckons he's onto a sure thing. Hopefully he is. But we as a community haven't got the funds to take that punt.
Professors During and Gluckman are living symbols of Auckland University's drive to become one of the world's elite research universities. Call me defeatist, but I don't see how an economically challenged country of 3 million people spread over a land the size of Britain, tucked away at the bottom of the world, can even think of achieving such a dream.
After all, we have our time cut out getting grommets into the ears of needy kids.
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