This unmentionability can have other serious consequences: if girls can't afford sanitary napkins or cloths, they use straw, or sand, or newspaper, often resulting in infections.
And as many people with respiratory tract infections don't need antibiotics in the first place, because the infection is not actually caused by bacteria, stopping them is perfectly safe.
These are figures that are not usually published but the severity of what happened at the hospital – they potentially include deaths, infections and abuse allegations – suggest serious problems of an unusual scale.
With the strain on acute hospitals – be it in overstretched A&E units, cancelled operations, bed blockers or hospital-acquired infections, top of the wish list for many will be telehealth and telecare.
Susan Bewley, professor of complex obstetrics at King's College, London, and chair of the Nice advisory group, added that infections were more common on hospital wards.
Poor maternal health, sexually transmitted infections, infant mortality, violence, abuse, illiteracy, isolation, psychological trauma and suicide are common among young brides.
As well as suffering increased risk of chest infections, strokes and heart attacks due to cold homes, elderly people become less agile, and more likely to fall and break a bone.
Ley said 65% of Australians believed antibiotics would help them recover from a cold or flu virus, despite the drugs only being useful to treat bacterial infections.
"Australians must understand that antibiotics will not work for viruses like colds and flu or for all types of infections," she said.
It should focus first on only three big killers of children in sub-Saharan Africa: diarrhoea, malaria and respiratory infections.
But rates of new HIV infections exceed treatment rates.
