Perceived Barriers to Managing Medications and Solutions to Barriers Suggested by Bhutanese Former Refugees and Service Providers.

INTRODUCTION: The purpose of this study was to explore perceived barriers to managing medications and potential solutions to such barriers among Bhutanese former refugees and service providers in Tasmania, Australia. METHOD: Thirty Bhutanese former refugees and service providers recruited through community health programs participated in a community-based participatory research design. Data were elicited through a structured focus group process and analyzed using content analysis. RESULTS: Perceived barriers to managing medications included language barriers, low health literacy, and culturally unresponsive interactions with services. Themes identifying potential solutions to barriers referred to the functional health literacy of individuals (providing reassurance, checking understanding, and involving support networks) and creating supportive health care environments (consistent service providers, culturally responsive care, assistance navigating services, using trained interpreters). DISCUSSION: Creating environments conducive to interactive and critical health literacy about medications is as important for culturally congruent care as supporting the functional health literacy of individuals.

Navigating unintelligibility: Queer Australian young women's negotiations of safe sex and risk.

Australian public health promotion positions safe sex as a biomedical, heteronormative concept. Consequently, there is a dearth of scholarly research examining queer young women's sexual health. To fill this knowledge gap, this article considers how Australian bisexual and queer young women understand 'safe sex' and conceptualise 'good' sexual citizenship. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 15 participants in Tasmania, findings reveal that although queer women understand heterosexual safe sex, there is little awareness of safer sexual practices with female partners. We argue that gendered sexual scripts shape perceptions of sexual health risk whereby queer women adopt multiple situation-dependent approaches to safer sex.

Convict bastards, common-law unions, and shotgun weddings: premarital conceptions and ex-nuptial births in nineteenth-century Tasmania.

This article uses reconstituted family data from birth, death, and marriage registers to measure ex-nuptial fertility and premarital pregnancies in nineteenth-century Tasmania. It also examines the extent to which convict origins of European society on the island caused a departure from English norms of family formation behavior, during a period when men greatly outnumbered women. Illegitimacy was high during the convict period. From the mid-1850s, after the convict system collapsed, levels of ex-nupital births were relatively constant until the end of the century, as indicated both by the illegitimacy rate and by the proportion of marriages associated with prenuptial births. By the end of the nineteenth-century, rates of illegitimacy and prenuptial conceptions in Tasmania were well within the range of those of contemporary English-speaking populations.

FMR1 alleles in Tasmania: a screening study of the special educational needs population.

The distribution of fragile X mental retardation-1 (FMR1) allele categories, classified by the number of CGG repeats, in the population of Tasmania was investigated in 1253 males with special educational needs (SEN). The frequencies of these FMR1 categories were compared with those seen in controls as represented by 578 consecutive male births. The initial screening was based on polymerase chain reaction analysis of dried blood spots. Inconclusive results were verified by Southern analysis of a venous blood sample. The frequencies of common FMR1 alleles in both samples, and of grey zone alleles in the controls, were similar to those in other Caucasian populations. Consistent with earlier reports, we found some (although insignificant) increase of grey zone alleles in SEN subjects compared with controls. The frequencies of predisposing flanking haplotypes among grey zone males FMR1 alleles were similar to those seen in other Caucasian SEN samples. Contrary to expectation, given the normal frequency of grey zone alleles, no premutation (PM) or full mutation (FM) allele was detected in either sample, with only 15 fragile X families diagnosed through routine clinical admissions registered in Tasmania up to 2002. An explanation of this discrepancy could be that the C19th founders of Tasmania carried few PM or FM alleles. The eight to ten generations since white settlement of Tasmania has been insufficient time for susceptible grey zone alleles to evolve into the larger expansions.

Vessels of progressivism? Tasmanian state girls and eugenics, 1900-1940.

In the early twentieth century the notion of state children as a "burden on the state", born of a liberal bourgeois philanthropic tradition, was gradually replaced in Tasmania by a modernising notion of intervention in the name of national efficiency. Eugenic principles can be shown to have influenced child welfare ideas and laws, notably the Tasmanian Mental Deficiency Act (1920). However, despite public debate and legislative changes, the bureaucrats in charge of state children maintained their liberal philanthropic practices. In many cases the Children of the State Department clashed with the Mental Deficiency Board. State direction of children was also frustrated by children's agency. Girls were the target of many eugenicist (and liberal evangelical) reforms, but they resisted attempts to control their sexuality and make them "useful". In Tasmania, the modernising impetus of progressive arguments was offset by bureaucratic stasis, and the agency of the subjects.

Chronic strongyloidiasis in Tasmanian veterans--clinical diagnosis by the use of a screening index.

Chronic infection with Strongyloides stercoralis presents a diagnostic problem because of the low recovery of the organism from stools and the insensitivity of current serological tests. Of 150 former Far East POWs, 26 (17%) had S. stercoralis in stools. The clinical features in 18 stool-positive patients were compared to those in 24 stool-negative patients and showed that strongyloidiasis was associated with a higher frequency of alteration in bowel habit, upper abdominal discomfort, rash and eosinophilia. On the basis of these features, a screening index was devised which largely separated stool-positive and stool-negative patients and led to helpful therapy in three of four patients with compatible symptoms who lacked a definitive diagnosis. Treatment with thiabendazole appeared to be superior to treatment with mebendazole.