My name is Lily Maddon and I'm a proud Arunda Bungelung Calcuttin woman from Gadighal country. The Daily oz acknowledges that this podcast is recorded on the lands of the Gadighl people and pays respect to all Aboriginal and Torrestrate island and nations. We pay our respects to the first peoples of these countries, both past and present.
Good morning and welcome to the Daily os It's Thursday, the thirtieth of November.
I'm Zara, I'm Saram.
Prime Minister Anthony Alberizi has made a national apology to those impacted by a morning sickness drug in the early sixties. The drug caused severe disabilities in thousands of babies whose mothers had taken the drug.
So let it be said today and recorded for all time. These parents, these mothers did nothing wrong. These parents did not foil their children. The system foiled them both.
Now we're going to explain what the drug is, harmit cause and why the PM apologized for it in the Deep Dive. But first the headlines.
Free television content will become easier to find on smart TVs. That's under new government measures legislation introduced by Communications Minister Michelle Roland will require TV manufacturers to prioritize the on screen discoverability of free tooware services over subscription services like Netflix. Roland said it's becoming harder to find Australian programming on connected devices like smart televisions, and that this bill will prevent content slipping behind online paywalls.
The Victorian government will repay seven million dollars worth of road taxes to electric vehicle owners in the state. Victorian ev drivers had been required to make payments based on the number of kilometers they traveled on public roads. However, that road charge was challenged in the High Court earlier this year and was eventually scrapped. Victorian Treasurer Tim Pallas told ABC News that government revenue from the tax will be repaid to drivers with interest.
Amazon has launched its new AI assistant, Amazon Q. The chatbot joins a growing market of AI assistants from tech companies including Open Ai, Google and Microsoft. Amazon Q is aimed at workplaces to help complete daily tasks and solve business issues. Amazon said it thinks Q has the potential to become a work companion for millions of workers. Pricing starts at around twenty US dollars per month per person.
And the good news forty one construction workers have been rescued after seventeen days trapped in a collapsed tunnel in India. A landslide in the Himalayas buried a section of the tunnel on the twelfth of November, but workers survived on food and water delivered to them by rescuers through small pipes. Handheld drills were used to eventually free all of the workers. They were taken from medical checks and observation before they
were sent home. So Sam, this story about thalidamide has obviously existed for a very long time, but was back in the new cycle yesterday because Anthony Alberinezi delivered a very rare but significant national apology to those affected. I'm interested to know if you'd heard of this before yesterday.
I really hadn't. I hadn't heard of it yesterday, and when I saw the emotional scenes unfolding in Parliament, it felt like I'd really missed a big discussion, like it's very rare for an apology to be delivered in the National Parliament, and so I knew it was important and I wanted to find out a bit more about it.
It was really interesting because I think like the majority of people we were speaking to hadn't heard of it before, right, And I thought that was interesting.
So before we get to the apology that was delivered yesterday, can we first go back to what the drug actually is and why it was used originally.
Yeah, So the drugs called thlidamide. It was an oral medication and it was given to pregnant women who were experiencing morning sickness. So you can imagine that that's a pretty big cohort. It was very big towards the end of the fifties and the beginning of the nineteen sixties. It was actually first developed as a sleeping pill, interestingly sold in Germany in nineteen fifty seven, and it ended up being distributed to about forty six countries around the world.
That of course included Australia, where we're talking about the story today here. It was sold from nineteen sixty and ended up being banned just a year later in nineteen sixty one.
So it wasn't on the shelves for a very long time, no.
But it still had a huge impact despite only being around for that short period.
What was that impact? Why was it then banned so quickly?
So essentially it was marketed as this reputable, highly effective drug, but ultimately thlidamide was quickly found to be very, very unsafe. It caused severe disabilities in the thousands of babies whose mothers had taken the drug again, they were taking it from warning sickness. What that looked like was babies being born with shortened or absent limbs, things like facial disfigurement or brain injury. There were also lowered health outcomes among survivors.
Things like poor mental health had also been reported. High rates of premature deaths due to thlinamide were also reported, and there were also miscarriages and infant deaths associated with the drug. As many as one hundred thousand babies were believed to have been affected by thlinamine.
And keeping in mind that time that it was on the shelf, that's a lot of people. Where were the signs in that year that the drug was dangerous and kind of take me through how it came off the shelves.
Yeah, So interestingly, it was an Australian doctor who was the first to publicly make the link between thlinamide and disabilities in infants.
So this was available elsewhere around them, and I think.
We said some of the forty six countries so yes. But it was an Australian doctor. His name is William McBride. He published a letter in a medical journal in nineteen sixty one asking other doctors if they had seen similar results to him, and the results he was talking about there were babies with a particular set of disabilities being
born to women who had taken thlidamide. So essentially he published what was an observation of a trend that he was detecting, basically a call out to see has anyone else seen this and could it be linked to the drug that these women are taking? Ultimately turned out to be true, and it was that that led eventually to a ban on the drug. Later that year, the German company that first developed the drug formally pulled thlidamide from
the market, and other distributors of course followed suit. While the drug was only in circulation for fewer than five years, it's fair to say it's had a generational impact on families and communities across the world, and here in Australia we saw the very real impact it had when Anthony Aberinezi apologized, and we've seen some really moving photos of people sitting in the public gallery balling because of it.
And there was a nice moment after as well where Anthony Albanese actually met some of the survivors and kind of embraced them personally. What did Anthony Aberanese actually apologize for?
Yeah, it was interesting. I called my mum to talk about this story yesterday and she couldn't understand what role the Australian government had in it. She was like, well, wasn't it the drug manufacturer or the researchers or you know, the doctors were prescribing it, Like why is it the Australian government? And essentially what Anthony Aberzi was saying was related to the Australian Government's failure to test the advertised
claims that the drug was safe to use. Essentially, he was apologizing that they didn't go far enough in testing these claims.
There was no system for properly evaluating the safety of medicines, and the terrible cruelty the lidamide was that far from being safe, just one dose was enough to cause devastating harm. Just one dose was enough to inflict a lifetime of damage on an unborn child or indeed cause premature death either in utero or in the years ahead.
And interestingly, the litamine tragedy partly led to the creation of the Therapeutic Goods Administration Yeah, the TGA, which is the medicine and the Therapeutic Regulatory Agency, so basically the group that is regulating the quality, the supply, the advertising of medicine here in Australia. But it was because of
this tragedy in part that that eventually was created. Albanize said that the Australian health system failed the mothers who used the littamite and he said they had been haunted by undeserved regret their whole lives, calling the period one
of the darkest chapters in Australia's medical history. And as we were just speaking about before, there were lots of survivors in Parliament yesterday when Anthony Abernesi delivered this apology, there was also a minute silence observed for those who had suffered or died due to the drugs.
So this apology didn't come out of nowhere. What have we seen the Australian government do over the last couple of years that's led to this.
So a key reform came back in twenty twenty, so that was the Morrison government at the time. They announced a program that would provide compensation for survivors.
Still remarkable, it was between nineteen sixty one to twenty twenty. Yes, it's a long time.
It actually came in two forms. So the first was a one off tax free payment between seventy five thousand dollars and half a million dollars. The amount that each recipient got would depend on their level of disability. The other was an ongoing annual payment, so that was designed to provide survivors with a very steady payment to then help them address what can only be characterized as like ongoing health needs on a day to day basis.
And when Anthony Albinezi won the election last year, did he maintain that Morrison government policy up until today.
So there hadn't been any changes until yesterday. In his apology, Albanezi promised two changes to the program. Firstly, he said that those who didn't receive compensation from the program when it launched would now be given the opportunity to make an application. He also committed to indexing the annual payments from the government, so that it just means that the payment will rise each year in accordance with inflation.
I think the thing that's really struck me about this story is that period between nineteen sixty one and twenty twenty, and I can only imagine the hard work that went into advocating for survivors during that time. So for then a program to come in twenty twenty and an apology to be delivered in National Parliament three years later does seem like progress in this space, and I hope it's brought some sort of solace to survivors and their families.
Yeah, and then on the symbolic side, there'll also be a national Solidimide recognition site. Basically a monument be unveiled in Canberra today and there'll be a ceremony that will be attended by polidamine survivors and their families.
That's all from us here today at The Daily Oz. If you enjoyed this podcast, would love you to leave a review or a comment and question in the Spotify answer box. You can also leave a review on Apple Podcasts if that's where you're listening. We'll be back again in your ears tomorrow morning. Until then, have a great day.