The World Food Programme (WFP), won the Nobel Peace Prize for its efforts to combat hunger and improve conditions for peace in conflicted-affected areas. Our professor Steve Haslett has been making a major contribution for a number of years to help WFP getting the illustrious medal.  He uses his expert statistics knowledge to fight the world hunger to decide where it is the best to distribute food aid, getting food to precisely the people who needed it the most.

In 2018/19, approximately 110,000 children aged 2-14 years had medicated asthma in New Zealand

Māori children (16.1%) had the highest rate of medicated asthma in 2018/19. They were 1.3 times as likely to have medicated asthma as other children, after adjusting for age and sex.

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38 monitoring stations exceeded the daily PM10 standard on almost 3,700 occasions between 2006 and 2016

More than three-quarters of these exceedances occurred in the colder months due to an increase in home heating emissions. Furthermore, winter weather conditions more easily allow for a build-up of air pollutants. 

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Eight out of eight monitoring stations exceeded the daily PM2.5 average guideline between 2008 and 2016

The guideline was exceeded on average of 88-times per year (2008-2016). Timaru exceeded the guideline the most, on average 62-times per monitored year.

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In 2019, there were 352 traffic-related fatalities in New Zealand

2019 was the first year since 2013 to have a lower road toll than the previous year. Motorcyclists were at a much greater risk of death than non-motorcyclists, having a 96 and 45 times greater risk of death (in terms of deaths per million kilometres travelled and million hours spent travelling respectively) than non-motorcyclists in 2015–18.

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In 2018, there were 4,363 hospitalisations for traffic-related injuries in New Zealand

Motorcyclists were 166 times as likely to be hospitalised as non-motorcyclists, and 137 times as likely to be hospitalised for every million hours spent travelling. Consequently, motorcyclists made up almost a quarter of all hospitalisations in 2015–18.

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In 2015–18, New Zealanders spent an average of 150.4 million hours travelling to work every year.

This is a new indicator for 2020. In 2015–18, travel by private vehicle accounted for 79.9% of the time New Zealanders spent commuting to work. The majority of this time was spent as the driver of the vehicle (73.5% of all commuting time) as opposed to travelling as passenger (6.4% of all commuting time).

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In 2019, there were 463 unintentional hazardous substances-related hospitalisations, and the number of hospitalisations has decreased since 2006 (563 hospitalisations)

Māori had a higher rate of hazardous substances-related hospitalisations than non-Māori since 2006.

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In 2019, there were a total of 98 hazardous substance notifications

In 2018 and 2019, children under the age of five years had the highest notification rate and most of their notifications involved household chemicals.

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There were 204 lead absorption notifications in 2019, an increase since 2017

Pacific people were most affected by lead exposure from their occupation in 2014–19.

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The age-standardised campylobacteriosis notification rate was 132 per 100,000 people in 2018 (6,463 notifications)

Notification rates for potentially waterborne diseases continued to be higher for children aged 0–4, people of European/Other, and people living in less deprived or rural areas.

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60% of New Zealanders on registered drinking-water supplies have access to fluoridated drinking-water​

60.0% (2,445,000 people) had access to fluoridated drinking-water in 2018–2019. This proportion has remained relatively stable since 2014–2015.

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76% of New Zealanders (3.1 million) on registered supplies received drinking water that met all bacteriological, protozoal and chemical requirements

Small drinking-water supplies were less likely to meet protozoal and bacteriological standards than larger supplies. 

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Between 2016–19, both freshwater and marine swimming sites in urban areas were least likely to be safe to swim

In the 2018–19 bathing season, 27.5% of monitored river swimming sites, 14.0% of monitored lake sites and 7.8% of monitored beach sites were frequently unsuitable for swimming, with 20% or more of the recorded FIB samples showing they were unsafe to swim.

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Kirstin Lindberg has completed her Graduate Diploma in Applied Statistics.

Patrick Hipgrave has completed his Master of Geographic Information Science.

Shunnie Xie has completed her Master of Analytics in Health.

Graduation photo/Patrick Hipgrave