Who is fiona stanley

She was taught by the top epidemiologists, sociologists and social medicine practitioners in the world. All the lights went on! Epidemiologists collect and examine data and statistics to find common risk factors, environmental impacts and patterns in health conditions within communities to develop better treatments.

Epidemiologists have rarely been in the public spotlight as much as they are currently, spearheading the public health response to the COVID pandemic.

Public health was still a new concept in Australia's health system when Professor Stanley returned to Perth in Professor Stanley and her team were the first to identify the differing health conditions between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal mothers and their children. Her team was working to discover if there was a kind of nutrition that helped prevent neural defects in unborn babies. Professor Fiona Stanley and Professor Carol Bower made a landmark discovery in , realising the crucial link between a lack of folate in a mother's diet and neurological tube defects such as spina bifida, anencephaly and encephalocele in babies.

Because of that research, many women throughout Australia now don't think twice about taking a folic acid supplement when they're trying to conceive and during pregnancy. Folate is crucial for the human body to make DNA, form red blood cells and grow and repair cells and tissues. The world's first public health folate campaign in the early s encouraged women to eat a diet rich in foods with folate and to take a folic acid vitamin supplement to prevent neural tube defects.

After almost two decades of lobbying, the federal and state governments agreed to compulsorily enrich breadmaking flour with folic acid.

Since , bread produced around Australia, one of the most commonly consumed foods, has had folate added to it. The impact of that mandatory fortification was swift, leading to a The rate of reduction among the Aboriginal population was significantly more, at 68 per cent. In , the Public Health Association of Australia named mandatory folate fortification as one of the top 10 public health achievements of the past two decades.

Her interest in science and medicine developed throughout her childhood and she was heavily influenced by her father, who was one of the world's first virologists and worked on the polio vaccine in the s. Dr Stanley completed her medical degree at the University of Western Australia in The latter she believed often resulted from the former; she famously declared that contemporary society is 'toxic for kids'.

Stanley was the Chief Executive Officer of the Australian Research Alliance for Children and Youth from to and then Chair of the organisation from to A new public hospital in Perth being built will be named the Fiona Stanley Hospital. She has also been commemorated through a stamp issued by Australia Post. So for me there was very much an applied end of it, I guess. I nearly didn't get through. Going through medical school was a very difficult time for me, actually.

For one thing, although I was very keen to do medicine, my parents didn't want me to do it. By this time you had moved to Perth from Sydney, and your father had got the foundation Chair of Microbiology — a non-doctor in the medical school. Yes, and not always loved as the 'members of the club' are. Here was a daughter who wanted to do medicine, and neither of my parents were particularly keen on it. It was such a long course, there were very few women doing medicine in those days — only six out of in my course — and in my family doctors weren't beloved.

I was the 'black sheep' going into medicine, because to them science was pure science and a PhD was the way to go. Also, I wasn't a particularly socially well-adjusted teenager. I was a very late developer in being able to cope with how to handle boys, for example. And doing medicine didn't help, because you were seen as a freak. I don't know where that late development came from — perhaps from the way that we were brought up as kids, in a family which did not have a very open relationship about voicing fears or emotions.

I wasn't particularly happy with how I related to other people at the age of 23 or I thought I was quite delayed compared with other people, but maybe everyone felt like that and it was just our era. I think my own children now are very much more open and competent socially than I was.

So I found medicine difficult from that perspective, and it wasn't really till the end of my course that I suddenly got very switched on because of a couple of people. One was Kevin Cullen. I know of him as the general practitioner in the Busselton area who set up the Busselton Study — one of the large-scale, population-based studies in Australia — and also one of our better wineries.

He was a most unusual person: an enthusiastic, hypermanic guy. I opted to do my general practice weeks with him because he was so enthusiastic. I'd been up in Papua New Guinea as a medical student for the three months of the holidays, and had got very unhappy about where I was going in medicine.

Kevin actually forgot about general practice and for the three weeks he just said to me, 'Look, you've got a brain, woman. Use it. Get your degree and start making something of your life. His inspiration was different. He kept saying, 'Yes, there is a child. But that child lives in a family, and it lives in a community, and it lives in a political structure. That has stood me in good stead throughout all of my epidemiological training. Was the elective in Papua New Guinea a revelation, considering that you already had a family connection with that country?

For me it was both a pilgrimage and a revelation. My grandfather was one of Douglas Mawson's students in geology and got the Tate Medal in Adelaide around His first posting was to Papua New Guinea, as the first government geologist in the Territory. Imagine: he had to go up there in and build his own house, his own photographic equipment.

Actually, he had first to go and find his boss, who had been lost for three months in the Highlands. They didn't know three million people lived in the Highlands at that time. I never met my grandfather — he died at the age of 36 — but he has been an inspiration to me because he was such an eclectic person. He had to know the languages; he was a geologist, obviously; he was a pioneer. And he was a beautiful-looking man. It's just amazing. He came down on 'furlough' — a three-month period every so often when the family would come to Adelaide — and he got an infected boil.

Perhaps he was weakened by malaria and all the other things they got up there, but anyway he died within about four days of a septicaemia, which now is entirely preventable. My father was six at that time; his sister was nine. Perhaps that influenced my father in doing his doctorate in streptococcal diseases. You don't quite know how these things happen. I was keen to go to Papua New Guinea for medical experience but also because I wanted to find some of my grandfather's original movie films from they had been lost and some of his maps.

They are now all in the National Archives. It was a sort of a pilgrimage, and I really loved it. It was fantastic. Well, that was getting back to the dream about the islands and the natives. Those three months of working in the Highlands showed me the hugely different problems that a country like Papua New Guinea faces in terms of diseases and in the disease spectrum, and it reinforced for me how limited medicine is as a means of coping with that.

A seed started to grow in my mind: if only you could prevent disease, if only you could find out why it was caused. It seemed obvious, for example, that vaccines to prevent malaria are the way to go, rather than just treating such an expensive disease. Generations of white Australians have grown up in big cities and on the coastal fringe, vaguely knowing about Aboriginal problems, maybe caring about them, but basically getting on with life.

What made the difference for you? It really started during my first year out as a resident doctor. I was heavily influenced by two trips that we did around the state, not as a proper epidemiological survey but really as a fact-finding expedition. That was my education of social environments and health, in that we were seeing 19th century hygienic poverty. Those trips were just amazing.

We visited every mission, camp, reserve and fringe-dwelling group in Western Australia. Talking to the old people, talking about what life had been like, trying to get a handle on the health issues and the environmental issues, I became absolutely involved in what was happening — and I have been from then on.

That was —72, when there was a Black Power movement in Australia. It was very easy for me then: everything black was good, everything white was bad. I was very naive in many ways about the whole thing. But our group put up a lot of fantastic proposals: if Aboriginal people are 3 per cent of the population, there should be 3 per cent teachers, 3 per cent doctors, 3 per cent social workers, 3 per cent of all these people — encouraging that kind of thing.

But it was paternalistic. We thought we knew the answers, so we didn't consult very widely with Aboriginal people. We were 'helping' them. We had a 'We're here to help you' kind of approach to things.

Although some of my very best friends, such as [Aboriginal leader and writer] Jack Davis, were hugely influential on how I thought, I wasn't really capable of taking a lot of that in until much later on. When you are young and enthusiastic, you imagine you can achieve things — as in your fantasy dream.

But with Indigenous health it takes a long time, because you have to ask and listen to what people themselves want. How I perceive that and how we run our Indigenous health research in the Institute has changed totally now. After your medical studies at the University of Western Australia you went overseas. Why did you leave? I was specialising in paediatrics, but I didn't finish.