No better day to post these

[seeingred]

Making progress: the health, development and wellbeing of Australia's children and young people. Australian Institute of Health and Welfare report, 24 September 2008

The report found that Indigenous Australian infants were three times as likely as other Australian children to die in the first year of life.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander

Comments

[doctor_k_]

>Indigenous mothers were twice as likely to bear low-birthweight babies

Only two times? Seems much, much more than that in Alice. I guess all the coastal and urban Aborigines kinda pull the average up.

[hiraethin]

Indeed - "...higher in remote and very remote areas (8.7%) and the most socioeconomically disadvantaged areas (7.2%)." So, indigenous, poor, remote area - the trifecta

[seeingred]

It's certainly true that rural Australians of all races get a raw deal when it comes to medical services. But have you got any sources on this Indigenous incompatability with employment and modern medicine?

[hiraethin]

No evidence, just my own theory. As I said, I don't think traditional indigenous culture is entirely congruent with access to modern opportunities and services. I am not suggesting that indigenous Australians are incompatible with employment and modern medicine; I am suggesting that indigenous Australian culture is not entirely compatible with access to modern opportunities and services. What I mean is that access to the latter tends to corrupt, if you like, or certainly transform, the former. I vaguely recollect an old assertion that when two cultures collide, the less advanced one is doomed. I think that's true