Over the past year, several senior Otago University researchers, including cancer researcher Associate Prof Tony Reeder, Prof Jennie Connor, head of the university's preventive and social health department, and paediatrics and child health researcher Prof Barry Taylor, have voiced concern over some of the country's negative public health statistics.
Late last year, Prof Reeder, director of the university's Cancer Society Social and Behavioural Research Unit, noted that New Zealand and Australia had the world's highest melanoma rates.
He pointed out that in 2008, latest available figures showed that 202 men and 115 women had died from melanoma in this country.
Australia was applying more government resources to tackle the problems, but in New Zealand melanoma-related public awareness campaigns were largely being left to a charity, the Cancer Society of New Zealand, to run.
About 180 people die in New Zealand each year from rheumatic heart disease, which a recent Ministry of Health report said had been ''virtually eradicated'' from most developed countries.
New Zealand's internationally high obesity rate is, at 27%, behind only the United States (33%) and Mexico, according to 2007 figures. The Government has significantly increased funding for health programmes to counter rheumatic heart fever, which has been linked with rural poverty, including in the east coast of the North Island.
And an independent task force on workplace health and safety has been established to investigate New Zealand workplace deaths and injuries.
The task force says it is about twice as dangerous to work in New Zealand as it is in Australia and nearly four times as risky as working in Britain.
Prof Thomson, of the Otago School of Dentistry, acknowledged some efforts were being made to counter problems with rheumatic fever and a high workplace death and injury toll.
But part of the problem had been that previous ''more market'' policies had contributed to a lack of focus on underlying public health problems, some of which also reflected social inequality.
The major drivers of such problems were ''outside the health sector''.
''The same things keep coming up again.''
Although the oral health of young people in New Zealand had generally improved in recent decades, he was concerned that 5000 children a year were experiencing dental caries so severe that teeth were being removed under general anaesthetic.
More focus on public health was needed if an ''embarrassing'' series of poor health outcomes was to be reversed, he said.
