Twelve Years of Smart Thinking
MUCH HAS CHANGED IN THE WORLD SINCE
launching MiNDFOOD 12 years ago. While I appreciate nothing stands still, it’s obvious we are living in a world with more global concerns than in 2008. One of them, of course, is the current coronavirus. Some years before MiNDFOOD launched, the world encountered the SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) outbreak in Guangdong in China in 2002. It spread to more than a dozen countries before it was stopped a year later, causing 774 deaths worldwide by July 2003.
In researching our feature on the current coronavirus (page 41), I was unaware of MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome), first identified in Saudi Arabia in 2012. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), MERS was reported in 27 countries, with the majority of human cases reported in Saudi Arabia. WHO says that by the end of November 2019, a total of 2,494 laboratory-confirmed cases of MERS were reported, including 858 associated deaths.
Disturbingly, MERS is an example of what is called a zoonotic virus – one that is transmitted primarily from animals to people. Scientific evidence suggests that in this case people were infected through direct or indirect contact with infected dromedary camels.
The current ‘novel’ coronavirus (COVID-19) is a new strain of coronavirus that has not been previously identified in humans, before the outbreak was reported in Wuhan, China in December 2019. Globally, as we go to press, 75,216 cases have been confirmed around the world, with 74,186 cases in China and a world death toll of 2011. Around 500 million people in China are currently affected by policies put in place restricting movement to contain the virus: equivalent to roughly 6.5 per cent of the world’s population. At least 48 cities and four provinces in China have issued official notices for lockdown policies, with measures ranging from “closed-off management”, where residents of a community need to be registered before they are allowed in or out, to restrictions that shut down highways, railways and public transport systems.
The crisis is having a major impact on the world economy. WHO’s joint mission with China has already started its outbreak investigation work focusing on how the new coronavirus is spreading and its severity.
In the world of politics in our year of launch, the US saw a Senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, beat the Senator from Arizona, John McCain, to become the first AfricanAmerican ever elected US President. I was in New York on the night of the election and the energy in the streets was exciting. The following year in our December edition, we had Michelle Obama on the cover, looking at her first year in the White House. That was one of our largest-selling Christmas issues. Since then Donald Trump, a celebrity television host and entrepreneur, has been installed as US President. We have no plans on covering the Trumps’ time in the White House, although when he was first elected to office, our online numbers spiked when we ran stories showcasing his latest outbursts.
Closer to home, a young politician called Jacinda Ardern became the world’s youngest female head of government, taking office at 37. I had just interviewed then-Labour leader Andrew Little for the upcoming election. While that issue was at the printers with that interview, things changed. Little was out. Ardern was installed as leader of the Labour Party and eventually went on to win the election. The rest, as they say, is history.
MiNDFOOD has requested interviews with Ardern since she became Prime Minister. But so far we have not been granted an interview with the leader described as “one of the most powerful women in the world”.
Interestingly, Australia has had five different prime ministers since MiNDFOOD was launched 12 years ago. Then there is Angela Merkel, chancellor of Germany since 2005, running the fourth-largest economy in the world, who commented in her New Year’s speech that she is fighting climate change with all her strength to enable future generations to live in peace and prosperity.
“Global warming is real,” Merkel said, “it is threatening.” Rising world temperatures and the problems created by global warming are all man-made, she added. “So we have to do everything humanly possible to overcome this human challenge. It is still possible.”
So in the past 12 years we’ve seen plenty of change here at MiNDFOOD as we have reported on the world, celebrated the people that have inspired us and contemplated the lives and experiences that have enhanced our knowledge. No matter how you access our content, whether it’s through the pages of the magazine, online or through social media, thank you for being part of the journey. The fun is only just beginning, as we head into our teenage years!