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recent decision by Queensland Health to stop funding the Torres Strait clinics has cracked open a political John Elway Broncos Jersey , diplomatic and ethical fault line on this most sensitive frontier, shining a spotlight into PNG’s neglected tuberculosis epidemic and the broader health catastrophe it is symptomatic of.


Australian self-interest has made the issue more intense. If evolving, drug-resistant variations of tuberculosis are allowed to brew just offshore, what would stop them crossing the border?


Amid an outcry that Queensland Health’s decision would condemn people to death, Canberra entered the fray Dre'Mont Jones Elite Jersey , declaring it would invest urgently and heavily in Western Province to help PNG better serve its own citizens. As a strategy this appears beyond debate – why rescue just the few when there is an opportunity to help many?


Because, say the critics on both sides of the border campaigning against the closure of the clinics, PNG’s beleaguered health system is a long way from being capable of caring for these patients, and lives will be sacrificed in the attempt.


In highlighting the scale of the failures within the PNG health system – widely acknowledged even by the PNG government as a wreck – the story of the Torres Strait clinics raises the fraught debate about the effectiveness of aid, and about how to turn Australia’s $400-million-a-year aid to PNG into real benefits for its people.
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Coming on the heels of two independent evaluations of the performance of Australian aid – one last year focused on PNG Drew Lock Elite Jersey , and one in May looking at AusAID’s role internationally – new strategies are being rolled out on the ground in PNG. The TB crisis, and the closure of the clinics, lends sudden urgency to these efforts.


Daru General Hospital, and the vast, impoverished Western Province region it serves Dalton Risner Elite Jersey , provides the theatre for a bold real-life experiment in which the stakes could not be higher.


Daru is the notional capital of Western Province, but the powerbrokers have long since moved north up the Fly River, closer to the action of Ok Tedi Mining’s copper operations. They left behind a dysfunctional, marooned island city with a pot-holed airstrip, a tenuous water supply Noah Fant Elite Jersey , an estimated 15,000 people – many crowded into shanty slums – and a hospital reputed to be one of the worst in the nation’s failing government health system.


In ”poor old South Fly”, observes AusAID’s PNG health program director, Dr Geoff Clark, ”seriously Royce Freeman Elite Jersey , God forgot them”.


Daru General Hospital struggles to find clean water, let alone medical staff. Buildings and equipment are dilapidated and broken. When The Age visited, neither the X-ray machine nor the tiny pathology unit was working.


Each morning, the sick are turned too quickly out of 90 beds to accommodate the next wave. Many come from ”the corners” – settlements that are home to the diaspora of Fly delta people who flock to Daru because they can’t get access to basic health services, schools Courtland Sutton Elite Jersey , banking and communications in their home villages, or because they have lost their gardens to rising king tides or to shifts imposed on the Fly River from the sediment washing down from Ok Tedi. With underlying malnutrition and overcrowding, disease spreads rapidly through the corners.