Australia Yearbook - 2001

368 Year Book Australia 2001
Child health since Federation
Professor Fiona J. Stanley *
Professor Fiona J Stanley AC is the Director, TVW
Telethon Institute for Child Health Research, and
Variety Club Professor of Paediatrics, the
University of Western Australia. Professor Stanley
graduated in medicine from the University of
Western Australia in 1970 and sought further
training in epidemiology, biostatistics and public
health in the UK and USA.
On her return to Perth in 1977 she, along with
other researchers in the NH&MRC Epidemiology
Unit, established the WA Maternal and Child
Health Research Data Base, a unique collection of
data on births from the entire State that supports
most of the research by her group.
Professor Stanley became the founding
Scientific Director of the TVW Telethon
Institute for Child Health Research in 1990.
The Institute fosters collaboration between
basic, clinical and population-based
research to address complex childhood
diseases, with a strong commitment to
translating the findings into better health and
health care in the community. Professor
Stanley serves on the Prime Minister’s Science,
Engineering and Innovation Council and is
Australia’s representative on the WHO
Western Pacific Advisory Committee for
Health Research.
“The state of individual health is constantly being influenced by numerous factors. The
racial stock to which the individual belongs may direct the general course of his health,
the prenatal condition of maternal health, the quality or sufficiency of food taken as an
infant and indeed throughout life are factors in which the relationship between cause
and effect is direct; the presence in the community of other racial stocks, age
composition of the population, the existence of communicable diseases in adjacent
countries, the social conditions generally, and even the forms of government, have an
influence no less important although indirect. In considering the public health in any
community, it is clearly necessary that a study should be made of each of these aspects of
social life with an attempt to estimate the extent of the influence of each on the aggregate
total of individual health in the community.” J.H.L. Cumpston, Director General of
Health, Commonwealth of Australia, 1928 (Cumpston 1989).
Introduction
A male child born at the beginning of the 20th
century (1901–1910) had a life expectancy at birth
of 55.2 years and one born at the end
(1995–1997) of 75.7 years. For females the figures
were 58.8 and 81.4 years respectively. At age
5 years the life expectancy was 57.9 years for
males and 60.8 years for females in 1901 and
71.3 and 76.9 years respectively in 1995–97. These
dramatic improvements over the last 100
years result from reductions in mortality at all
ages, but particularly in early childhood, as
shown by the impact in removing under fives
mortality from the life expectancy
calculations—the improvement in life
expectancy at age five compared to life
expectancy at birth was significantly greater
in the early 1900s than in the 1990s.
* The staff of the Perth office of the Australian Bureau of Statistics (Elena Mobilia and Daniel
Christensen) worked hard to obtain much of the data for this article. Dr Peter Winterton
and Professor Geoffrey Bolton suggested books on medical history and commented on the
text. Dr Natalia Bilyk, Barbara Moore and Colleen Moylan provided library and clerical
support. I am also grateful to my colleagues in the Population Sciences Division at the
Institute for Child Health Research for the research they do and the environment they
provide for work such as this.