After the pandemic started to settle we were promised an OZ CDC
It there an sign as yet?
Act now before ’pandemic amnesia’ sets in
27 Sept,2024
Melbourne was nearing the end of its first 100 days of strict lockdowns and premiers were cautiously planning to loosen border controls in October 2020 when federal opposition leader Anthony Albanese made a significant pledge to protect the country in future pandemics.
Australia couldn’t afford a repeat of the Ruby Princess debacle, where infected cruise passengers were allowed to disembark freely in NSW, or the unfolding disaster in aged care where 673 people had already died, he said.
“Our health, our lives and our economy all depend on us getting the response to future pandemics right,” Albanese said, vowing that a Labor government would establish a new body, the Australian Centre for Disease Control, to strengthen the country’s preparedness and lead the fight in future outbreaks.
It was an uncontroversial announcement – opposition health spokesman Chris Bowen correctly pointed out that peak health bodies had been calling for a central entity for more than 30 years; it was mooted by the Australasian Epidemiological Association at its inaugural conference back in 1987. “It’s time to get on with it,” Bowen said in 2020. “An Australian CDC would save lives and ease the pain of chronic illness.”
The same experts who looked to that promise and follow-up $90m post-election commitment with hope are now frustrated that this much-vaunted linchpin to Australia’s future pandemic response is inching along, losing momentum and serving as proof, they say, that lessons from the Covid era risk being lost.
Public consultation and expert roundtables were held in 2022, leading many to believe the government was pursuing its policy with zeal in the face of ongoing warnings that viral disease outbreaks were increasing in frequency and severity. The CSIRO says two novel viruses, on average, are appearing in humans every year and the proportion that gives rise to larger outbreaks is growing. In other words, this is no time for complacency.
“The pandemic demonstrated really clearly why a CDC body is important and we were delighted with the government’s announcement, but what’s happened since then has been puzzling,’’ Australian Medical Association president Steve Robson says. “Evidence that we’ve learned the lessons from the last pandemic would be a functional CDC, and we haven’t seen that yet. I would need to be convinced that we could cope with the next pandemic well at all.’’
Adjunct professor Terry Slevin, head of Australia’s peak body for public health, says the proposed centre should be far more advanced than it is and he doubts the necessary enabling legislation will be introduced in this government’s first term, as expected. He calls the lack of solid progress “pandemic amnesia”.
“There’s lack of certainty about the ACDC’s future and lack of clarity in relation to resources,” says Slevin, chief executive of the Public Health Association of Australia. “There’s still people wondering whether it will become a reality.”
Robson agrees. “It’s crunch time. I’m sceptical that this can be delivered by the government as promised, in the timeframe as promised,” he says.
In the wash-up from the Covid-19 pandemic many health and science groups – from the Australasian Epidemiological Association and the Doherty Institute to the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation and the Australian Academy of Science – recommended an ACDC to undertake real-time monitoring of infectious diseases, collect national data and provide expert and transparent advice to government. “It would provide for a co-ordinated national health response that gets away from individual state or territory political responses,” Robson says.
Here is the link:
Typical Government – great announcements and bugger all action.!
Just pathetic – won’t happen in my lifetime I suspect!
David.
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