claudine_c

Richard Doll, an epidemiologist who helped identify the association between smoking and lung cancer, died on Sunday 24 July at the age of 92.

William Richard Shaboe Doll was born in 1912 and trained as a doctor at St Thomas’s Hospital, London. He worked as a physician in various London hospitals and with the Royal Army Medical Corps during the Second World War.

In 1948 Doll joined the Medical Research Council and worked with Austin Bradford Hill on an investigation into the rising numbers of deaths from lung cancer. Their research team interviewed hundreds of newly admitted hospital patients and found that those patients who had been diagnosed with lung, liver or bowel cancers were more likely to have smoked than those who were admitted for other reasons. The association between smoking and cancer was reinforced by a long-term study of British doctors, which also found an association between premature death from cancer and a history of smoking.

In collaboration with Richard Peto, Doll continued studying the effects of smoking, identifying, among other things, the association between smoking and other cancers, heart attacks and emphysema, and the dangers posed by passive smoking. Besides his work on smoking, Doll investigated numerous other aspects of health, among them the effects of exposure to asbestos and radiation, and the effects of oral contraception. However, his work on tobacco is remembered as his most significant contribution to world public health, and has been acknowledged by British, American and United Nations honours.

Richard Doll was predeceased by his wife, Joan Faulkner, and is survived by their son and daughter.

Sources: British Medical Journal, BBC profile and obituary, Telegraph, Wikipedia.

[Written for Blogcritics.]

On Thursday and Friday I attended a conference on Researching Refugee Health organised by the Refugee Health Research Centre at La Trobe University. “Health” here is a broad term, encompassing social and mental as well as physical health. This conference was attended mostly by academic researchers, practitioners (doctors, psychologists, community workers) who do research, and postgraduate students, but also by hospital staff and DIMIA (Department of Immigration, Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs) officials.

The DIMIA staff were mostly observers at the conference but were asked publicly about what they thought of the criticism of their department that comes from many refugee advocates and researchers. One of them said that criticism inside the department is strongly discouraged. This is not surprising in light of what the public has learned from the Rau and Alvarez debacles. It was encouraging to see that some DIMIA staff wanted to engage with these debates (at what personal cost, I don’t know) and I hope that positive change is possible within the department.

The conference featured a mix of keynote speeches, case study discussions, workshops and informal discussions. The four themes addressed by the keynotes were longitudinal study methods, researching detention centres, ethical dilemmas in refugee research and community based action research. Many of the participants said that research among refugees in Australia is often motivated by an urge to do justice and right wrongs, motives which are sometimes at odds with the mythical “objectivity” that is supposed to be the basis of academic and scientific research.

Another complaint was that there were all these intelligent, sensitive, highly qualified professors and doctors publishing reports on the harmful effects of the government’s asylum seeker policy, and this research had no effect on government policy. In the face of such apparent futility, some people argued that the value of research was in witnessing to and validating the lived experiences of refugees, a function that many refugees themselves valued. Deborah Zion drew parallels with Holocaust testimony in her exhortation to avoid collective dementia.

Sandy Gifford and the other people behind the conference wanted to determine recommendations and points for action rather than just let the conference end with a whimper. There seemed to be a consensus that there is a need for some kind of network to allow better communication between the many people working with and researching refugee issues. There were also a few of us who thought that the academic bias of such conferences could be tempered by more community involvement, and by engagement with artists and performers who have powerful ways of bearing witness.

The organisers could not have anticipated this, but the timing of the conference coincided with Petro Georgiou and other Liberal members of Parliament threatening to defy the government with a private members’ bill which would soften the government’s policy on asylum seekers and detention. An agreement has been negotiated which meets most of Georgiou et al’s demands, with the glaring exception that indefinite detention has not been rejected. Time will tell how much of a difference this will make to the lives of asylum seekers.