risking our kids
synopsis
Increasing childhood rates of diabetes, respiratory disease, behavioural disorders, obesity and one in four children with mental health problems lead former Australian of the Year, Fiona Stanley to predict that the next generation of Australians could have a shorter life expectancy than their parents. But this is 2008. Australia is awash with cash. Shouldn’t our children be the healthiest kids in history? Child health expert, Professor Fiona Stanley believes they are not.
Following Fiona Stanley and her team of scientists from their cutting edge laboratories to remote Aboriginal communities and into increasingly wealthy but unhealthy homes around Australia this film builds the case for what Fiona calls “the modernity paradox”.
Can it be that our contemporary western lifestyle is delivering a toxic physical and social environment in which children are growing up sick? After a lifetime of cutting edge scientific study into the condition of the nation’s children, Fiona Stanley passionately and eloquently explores the alarming, measurable health effects of the way we now bring up children. These are not problems without solutions, but, say Fiona, effective action needs political and community will right now.
Fiona Stanley - Background
Fiona Stanley is one of Australia’s leading scientists and Australia’s expert on children’s health. She has established the country’s largest scientific research institute studying children’s health. Their research provides the basis for much of this country’s knowledge about children’s health and also contributes to an international scientific understanding of how children are doing on a global scale. It is the intersection of Fiona’s life and work that provides us with the framework to develop a story that looks through the prism of science at the social challenges Stanley believes are confronting our society. She calls it “the modernity paradox” and she predicts its effects on children’s health will shorten the life expectancy of future generations. She also calls it a disgrace.
Fiona came from a famous scientific family. Her father worked with Salk to find the polo vaccine. She grew up watching science solving problems. She began her undergraduate life believing that science could change the world. Early in her career she hit a snag. No matter how much knowledge and healing she applied to the simple illnesses of a young Aboriginal boy, in the end the environment he lived in killed him. Fiona decided she had to fix the health of communities – particularly in her watershed, the Aboriginal communities of Western Australia. In the early seventies she took off on a journey through the remote communities and had an epiphany. She realised there was much more to finding a solution than medicine. She understood that her ignorance about the culture prevented her from being
useful scientifically. She had reached a dead end. She left the country.
At this very low point in her life, Fiona went overseas where, at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Health, she found she’d stumbled into the top place in the world to study social medicine. Collaboration was their doctrine. Prevention was their mantra. Fiona had found a new way. It was something she would champion for the rest of her life.
She came back to Australia and blazed a path on her own. She took a radical approach to how science
should be conducted. She believes that it is practical delivery was paramount and should be part of the
research. She began studying disease in an entirely different way. She insisted on a multi-disciplinary
approach. She established the Telethon Institute for Child Health Research and charged her colleagues with one simple guiding principle: to establish why children get sick and to try to prevent it.
