Auckland Council needs to speed up the process to ban smoking in public if New Zealand is to become smoke-free by 2025, says Action on Smoking and Health. The council recently revealed plans to make Auckland gradually and voluntarily smoke-free by 2018. The decision was made the same week a New Zealand Herald poll that [...]

This week is Coeliac Awareness Week. It might be hard to spell but it is a good thing to know about. Coeliac disease is an autoimmune disease that causes the immune system to misfire and attack the digestive tract whenever it detects gluten in the system. Gluten is a protein found in wheat, barley, oats [...]

Becky Rutherford and Beatrice Randell report the health news from today’s budget.

An Auckland couple have each conquered the 1103 stairs in the Sky Tower Stair Challenge, honouring their son and stepson Ethan who died of leukeamia aged 11 last year. The event at the weekend raised funds for Leukaemia and Blood Cancer New Zealand (LBCNZ). Georgie Hackett from LBCNZ says event raised $113,000 for LBCNZ, almost double the $63,000 raised [...]

Preventing rural suicide needs more attention paid to it than much-publicised quad bike safety, says a top farming official. New Zealand’s high suicide rates in rural areas must be openly addressed, says Jeanette Maxwell, a  Federated Farmers national board member. Ms Maxwell thinks the issue can no longer be swept under the rug given statistics which show [...]

Flu jab numbers are up this year at AUT University – in line with a rise across New Zealand – but overall students are still shying away from the needle. Michelle Kapinga, National Influenza programme manager, understands that 18- to 20-year-olds think they’re “bulletproof’”.  “But if you overlay influenza on top of asthma, people can [...]

Teaching kids the basics of where food comes from and how to prepare it is beginning to pay big dividends for the schools involved in the Garden to Table programme in New Zealand. The programme teaches children aged seven to 10 how to grow, harvest, prepare and share seasonal food. In 2009, Catherine Bell founded [...]

Two thousand Otara children had a free breakfast yesterday, in a televised promotion for the Mana Party’s $100 million food-in-schools proposal. Musicians, TV personalities and the crew of Maori Television’s Pukana programme were at the breakfast - a follow-up to Mana’s annual meeting in Tokoroa at the weekend. Labour, Green, Maori Party, New Zealand First and independent MPs are supporting [...]

The number of doctors graduating from New Zealand universities is rising anually, despite the limited number of first year jobs available. The situation is leaving international graduates out in the cold, and could soon affect domestic graduates as well. Lira Lecias, an international medical graduate from the Philippines, says it has become nearly impossible to [...]