A prominent Australian eye surgeon caused a storm of protest this week
when he warned that AIDS could devastate the Aboriginal population unless
steps are taken to ‘monitor and control’ people who may introduce the
disease to remote communities.
About 15 000 people in Australia are HIV-positive, of whom 90 per cent
are homosexual men. Cases of HIV infection have not been classified by race,
but Aborigines with the virus are thought to live largely in cities, rather
than in rural areas.
Last week’s statements by Fred Hollows, an ophthalmologist known for
his work on eye disease in Eritrea and other parts of Africa, have been
widely interpreted as calling for the quarantining of Aborigines with AIDS.
But Hollows, who was speaking at a conference in Alice Springs, denies that
this is what he advocates.
The conference passed a resolution condemning much of what Hollows
had to say. It said: ‘This conference rejects the damaging statements by
Professor Fred Hollows regarding the quarantining of Aboriginal people
living with AIDS. His statements, which received sensational media coverage,
were uninformed and harrnful to positive education strategies currently
being used by Aboriginal people.’
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Hollows has worked extensively on eye disease among Aborigines. He told
the conference that ‘expert people’ he had spoken to believed that the heterosexual
transmission of HIV could ‘quite quickly’ become established in the Aboriginal
community. If this happened it could lead to death rates comparable to those
during the smallpox epidemics of 1789 and 1829.
‘I know of the devastation of AIDS in Africa and I don’t want that to
happen to Aboriginal people in Australia,’ Hollows said when explaining
his comments. He listed nine points that he said should be considered by
the Aboriginal community. These included avoiding many sexual partners,
the ‘watching and control’ of movements of Aborigines between city and country,
and direct intervention to prevent intravenous drug use.
Kathy Kum-Sing, who coordinates work on AIDS among Aborigines in New
South Wales, said that Hollows’s views were ‘out of date and culturally
inappropriate for Aboriginal people’. Sol Bellear, of the Aboriginal and
Torres Strait Islander Commission, said: ‘We want to include HIV-positive
people in our communities, not reject them.
![Astronomers have long known that understanding how star clusters come to be is key to unlocking other secrets of galactic evolution. Stars form in clusters, created when clouds of gas collapse under gravity. As more and more stars are born in a collapsing cloud, strong stellar winds, harsh ultraviolet radiation and the supernova explosions of massive stars eventually disperse the cloud, and their light can bear down on other star-forming regions in the galaxy. This process is called stellar feedback, and it means that most of the gas in a galaxy never gets used for star formation. Researching how star clusters develop can answer questions about star formation at a galactic scale. Now, the state of the art has been further developed with both Hubble and Webb working together to provide a broad-spectrum view of thousands of young star clusters. An international team of astronomers has pored over images of four nearby galaxies from the FEAST observing programme (#1783), trying to solve this mystery. Their results show that it is the most massive star clusters that clear away their gaseous shroud the fastest, and begin lighting their galaxy the earliest. The team identified nearly 9000 star clusters in the four galaxies in different evolutionary stages: young clusters just starting to emerge from their natal clouds of gas, clusters that had partially dispersed the gas (both from Webb images), and fully unobstructed clusters visible in optical light (found in Hubble images). With Webb???s ability to peer inside the gas clouds, they were able to then estimate the mass and age of each cluster from its light spectrum. This image shows a section of one of the spiral arms of Messier 51 (M51), one of the four galaxies studied in this work, as seen by Webb???s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). The thick clumps of star-forming gas are shown here in red and orange, representing infrared light emitted by ionised gas, dust grains, and complex molecules such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). Within these gas complexes, each tens or hundreds of light years across, Webb reveals the dense, extremely bright clusters of massive stars that have just recently formed. The countless stars strewn across the arm of the galaxy, many of which would be invisible to our eyes behind layers of dust, are also laid bare in infrared light. [Image description: A large, long portion of one of the spiral arms in galaxy M51. Red-orange, clumpy filaments of gas and dust that stretch in a chain from left to right comprise the arm. Shining cyan bubbles light up parts of the gas clouds from within, and gaps expose bright star clusters in these bubbles as glowing white dots. The whole image is dotted with small stars. A faint blue glow around the arm colours the otherwise dark background.]](https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/13114322/SEI_296271016.jpg)
