Owen Dyer Montreal

Italy’s health minister, Giulia Grillo, has fired all 30 independent members of the country’s Superior Health Board, a body set up to advise the government on all aspects of public health, explaining that she wished to send a “signal of discontinuity.”

Although incoming governments have occasionally changed a few staff on the council, such wholesale dismissal is unprecedented. The current board was appointed last year and was supposed to remain in place until 2020. It was unchanged from the previous three year term, which began in 2014.

“I decided to give a signal of discontinuity with respect to the past by renewing the composition of the 30 members,” wrote the health minister, a member of the ruling coalition’s Five Star Movement, on her Facebook page. “We are the #governmentofchange and, as I have already done for other appointments to ministry committees, I have chosen to …