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Alexas Fotos/Pexels One Nation leader Pauline Hanson has called for a 75% cut to the tobacco tax and a freeze on any price indexation of the tax for three years. Hanson said this would make cigarettes cheaper and so undercut Australia’s growing illicit tobacco market. One Nation argues this would b...

From the first hint of cold winter mornings, supermarkets and pharmacies begin heavy marketing to coax us to stock up on vitamin C to get through the cold and flu season. But where did that idea come from? As we’ll see, it’s a story including a Nobel Prize winner, a book and some claims that don’t q...

AFP via Getty Images Delegates attending the Pacific HIV Symposium in Fiji next week will be confronting one of the region’s most urgent health challenges: the fastest growing HIV outbreak in the world. HIV prevalence among adults in Fiji is now 1.6%. This means about one in 60 adults lives with th...

Akelomongkol/Getty Images Many Australians assume that when a child is refused bail, they’re taken straight to a youth detention centre. In reality, many spend days – and sometimes weeks – in police custody before being transferred to youth detention. Last week, an ABC investigation revealed childre...

Lambert and Young/Getty Shingles (herpes zoster) is often thought of as an older person’s disease. But in the past two decades, we’ve seen a rise in reported cases of this viral disease – which causes a painful, blistering rash and nerve pain – among younger adults aged 25–49. To what extent this r...

Yoon S. Byun/The Boston Globe via Getty Images If you’ve ever visited Papua New Guinea you’ll have been struck by the friendliness of the people, and their welcoming smiles. You might also have noticed some of those smiles are red. It’s caused by the chewing of “betel quid”, a mixture of unripe arec...

Trying to get an ageing parent into care can feel like trying to land a plane in a storm while also looking after kids in the back row. This is the reality for the “sandwich generation”: adults who are supporting ageing parents while raising their own children. The pressure becomes intense when a pa...

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Liukov/Getty Paris Hilton’s mother Kathy recently tried the “Jell-O diet” to lose weight. She believed other celebrities – Oprah Winfrey, Doctor Oz, Michelle Obama and Kelly Clarkson – had endorsed it. But the diet was fake and so were the endorsements. Both had been generated by artificial intellig...