We live in an ever changing world and one of the things that is disappearing is that familiar big red mail box that used to stand at the kerb in just about every suburb. They are going the same way as the public telephone booth, made redundant when the mobile phone burst onto the scene and now it is rare to see a person without one in their hand.
It seems that the cut off point is twenty-five letters posted each day, and the "decommissioning " rate has seen the removal of 190 mail boxes in New South Wales between 2012-14. It seems that the traditional walk to post a letter is getting ever longer.
This inconvenience will fall heavily on the aged and those with infirmities and it is likely that a new posting trend will emerge for those still using "snail mail ". As long as the postal service continues a daily mail delivery, it will be possible to hand that postperson outward mail and thus eliminate the need for mailboxes. If that trend takes hold it will hasten the extinction of public mailing facilities.
Towards the middle of this year New South Wales will fall into line with other states and allow pharmacists to give the annual flu jab to customers over the age of eighteen years. This will draw the ire of the medical profession and in the past pharmacists were required to have either a qualified doctor or nurse on the premises to provide this service.
It seems that the Federal government is closing the "Conscientious Objector " loophole that is being used to avoid vaccinating children against childhood diseases. A small core of anti-vaccination fanatics are very vocal in claiming that vaccines are responsible for spreading Autism, despite this being totally rejected by the scientific community. This has led to vaccination rejection becoming a "fad "that is endangering the mass immunity as unvaccinated child numbers reach forty thousand - and continue to grow rapidly.
Some religions contain beliefs that oppose vaccination and these are accepted under our religious tolerance laws, but anyone can claim to be a "Conscientious Objector " - without any sort of qualification. From January 1, 2016 a law change will withdraw the Family Tax benefit, Child Care benefit and the subsidies for fees at childcare centres for unvaccinated children that could amount to over $ 15,000 a year. A claim to be a Conscientious objector will not be an acceptable defence against failure to vaccinate.
The problem is that the right of choice for the few can allow the reintroduction of diseases that have long been conquered to return to this country. The scourge of polio has almost been defeated on a world wide basis, but resistance to vaccination in a handful of countries is allowing it to emerge and once again take hold. Tuberculosis was once a scourge in Australia but a dedicated campaign of mass screenings saw it defeated.
Change has always been with us. The introduction of one new concept sees the withdrawal of another older service- just as electricity banished gas as the means of lighting our homes. There will always be sceptics who disagree with what others see as fundamentals. There are many who still contend that the earth is flat and some insist that the moon landing was an event filmed in a movie studio. These are harmless delusions, but when they take deeproot in the community and become a matter of life or death to the health of others we need to take them seriously.
It will be interesting to see how these convictions fare when they come into conflict with the mighty flow of dollars !
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