Posts from May 2021 (22)

Congratulations to Dr Sally-Ann Harbison for her award of membership to the NZ Order of Merit in the New Year’s honours list of 2021. This acknowledges her service to forensic science.

Dr Sally-Ann Harbison leads the Forensic Biology Team at the Institute of Environmental Science and Research (ESR). Dr Harbison has a joint appointment with the University of Auckland’s Department of Statistics.

Dr Harbison initially joined ESR’s precursor, DSIR, in 1988 in the chemistry division, where she focused on crime scene and evidence examinations including identifying body fluids and blood grouping.

Her work led her to play a significant part in many prominent New Zealand cases. With ESR, she has been a major contributor to the development and application of New Zealand’s Forensic DNA capability. In 1999 she worked on the first homicide case that was solved by using the DNA Profile Databank.

She has been the case manager in a number of old cases that are being reviewed with more modern DNA methods. She has collaborated with colleagues worldwide and represented ESR on various international committees. She has spoken at many international conferences and meetings and written more than 60 publications in her field. She has taught at University of Auckland since 1996, supervising more than 60 MSc and PhD students.

Dr Harbison has led the Biology Specialist Advisory Group of the Australia/New Zealand Forensic Executive Committee and been an assessor for both Australian and American accreditation bodies.

• Mediawatch took on bogus polls and interviewed me.
• If you ask people whether the recent stories about blood clotting affect their views on Covid vaccines they will say ‘yes’. But if you asked people, before and after, what their views actually are, there’s a very slight change to be more pro-vaccine.
• A study of 9806 blood donors found 8 had antibodies to the Covid virus.  Extrapolated crudely to all of NZ that’s about 4000 undiagnosed cases. I’m not giving a statistical uncertainty interval because the non-sampling uncertainty is going to be larger — blood donors tend to be younger and so more likely to have been asymptomatic/weakly symptomatic and thus not tested, but might also be less likely to have been infected.  Still, the number is in the sort of range you’d expect.