Developing students' critical literacy: Exploring identity construction in young adult fiction

The authors use a critical literacy stance to engage students in a discussion of young adult literature from Australia and America. They offer a framework teachers can use to initiate discussions based on critical literacy in their own classrooms.

International images and mass media: The effects of media coverage on Canadians' perceptions of ethnic and race relations in Australia

Recently, there has been much speculation about the impact of international media coverage of Australia's position on Indigenous people, migrants and asylum seekers on other nations' images of Australia. In this experiment we examined whether there was any basis for such concerns by considering the short-term impact of negative TV coverage of Australians on Canadian viewers. A questionnaire provided baseline data on Canadian students' perceptions of Australians and Australian race relations. Four months later, the students were assigned to one of three conditions that varied media contact with Australians. Students viewed one of two television programs (about right-wing political independent, Pauline Hanson, and her emotive criticisms of Aborigines and Asian immigrants or about an ethnically-mixed group of young Australians and their positive sense of cultural identity), or they viewed no program (no contact control). Results indicated that both positive and negative media coverage of Australians affected Canadians' views of Australia in the short-term. In particular, negative coverage (of Hanson) promoted less favourable views of Australians and Australian race relations over time and relative to the positive media and no media control conditions. The media's role in shaping international images is discussed.

Telepaediatrics and diabetic retinopathy screening of young people with diabetes in Queensland

We have examined the feasibility of a telemedicine-enabled screening service for children and adolescents with diabetes in Queensland. There are approximately 1400 young people with diabetes in Queensland and only about two-thirds of them are screened in accordance with international guidelines. A regional retinal screening service was established using a non-mydriatic digital retinal camera. Seven centres volunteered to participate in the study. During a five-month pilot trial, 83 of the young people with diabetes who attend these centres underwent digital retinal screening (3.7%). Retinal images were sent via email to a paediatric ophthalmologist for review and results were returned via email. A copy of each participant's results was forwarded by mail to the referring diabetes doctor and the participant and family. The majority of the image files (96%) were rated as excellent or good. Only one participant was identified as having an abnormal result. Participants and their families expressed satisfaction with the digital retinal screening process.

Diabetes as a tracer condition in international benchmarking of health systems

OBJECTIVE - To assess the performance of health systems using diabetes as a tracer condition. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS - We generated a measure of case-fatality among young people with diabetes Using the mortalily-to-incidence ratio (M/I ratio) for 29 industrialized countries using published data on diabetes incidence and mortality. Standardized incidence rates for ages 0-14 years were extracted from the World Health Organization DiaMond Study for the period 1990-1994; data on death from diabetes for ages 0-39 years were obtained from the World Health Organization Mortality database and converted into age-standardized death rates for the period 1994-1998, using the European standard population. RESULTS - The MA ratio varied > 10-fold. These relative differences appear similar to those observed in cohort studies of mortality among young people with type I diabetes in five countries. A sensitivity analysis showed that using plausible assumptions about potential overestimation of diabetes as a cause of death and underestimation of incidence rates in the U.S. yields an M/I ratio that would still be twice as high as in the U.K. or Canada. CONCLUSIONS - The M/I ratio for diabetes provides a means of differentiating countries on quality of care for people with diabetes. It is solely an indicator of potential problems, a basis for Stimulating more detailed assessments of whether such problems exist, and what can be done to address them.

Genetic uniformity of international isolates of Leifsonia xyli subsp xyli, causal agent of ratoon stunting disease of sugarcane

An international collection of the sugarcane ratoon stunting disease pathogen, Leifsonia xyli subsp. xyli, was analysed to assess genetic diversity. DNA fingerprinting using BOX primers was performed on 105 isolates, comprising 65 Australian isolates and an additional 40 isolates from Indonesia (n = 8), Japan (n = 1), USA (n = 3), Brazil (n = 2), Mali (n = 2), Zimbabwe (n = 13), South Africa (n = 9) and Reunion (n = 2). Sixty-two of these isolates were also screened using ERIC primers. No variation was found among any of the isolates. The intergenic spacer (IGS) region of the ribosomal RNA genes from 54 isolates was screened for sequence variation using single-stranded conformational polymorphism (SSCP), but none was observed. Direct sequencing of the IGS from a subset of nine isolates, representing all of the countries sampled in this study, confirmed the results of the SSCP analysis. Likewise, no sequence variation was found in the 16S ribosomal RNA genes of the same subset. Four Colombian isolates from sugarcane, morphologically similar to L. xyli subsp. xyli, were putatively shown to be an undescribed Agrococcus species of unknown pathogenicity. The lack of genetic variation among L. xyli subsp. xyli isolates, independent of time of sampling, cultivar of isolation, or country of origin, suggests the worldwide spread of a single pathogenic clone, and further suggests that sugarcane cultivars resistant to ratoon stunting disease in one area should retain this property in other regions.