Infectious disease: nature bites back

Sixthly, our complacency when confronting infectious disease outbreaks and our government and medical fraternity's inability to understand how ordinary people regard risk and exposure in their lives also adds an important variable. Our history of official response to major outbreaks of infectious disease is simply littered with examples of lack of cooperation, of self-interest, over-reaction and outright antagonisms. Our response to many disease outbreaks demonstrates how vested interests and State-Commonwealth rivalries intersected with matters of health and made infectious disease control a difficult undertaking.

Finally, the way we tend to ignore infectious diseases that cause few deaths but incapacitate many people for a few weeks has long- term implications. Mosquito-borne infections in Australia such as Dengue provide a good example. Dengue epidemics have been a familiar part of Australian life since the 1870s particularly in parts of Northern New South Wales and Queensland. The 1925-26 Epidemic which almost reached Sydney is a case in point where 560,000 cases of Dengue occurred but only 147 deaths. Dengue and a variety of other mosquito-borne infections continue to affect Australians every year but very few die. Perhaps the low death rate is the reason we have lived with and continue to live with Dengue.

Threats from the microbial world are not new. Australia's history is simply littered with outbreaks of infectious disease. Australia has been swept up in at least 22 Pandemics and more than 30 major Epidemics since the early days of settlement including Smallpox in 1881-82 and 1913-17, Influenza in 1891 and 1919, Bubonic Plague in 1900-23, Dengue in 1925-26, Polio in 1903-56, HIV/AIDS in 1982-2011, SARS in 2003, Avian Flu - and now Covid. Many of these produced extraordinary scenes as the Government struggled to come to grips with the outbreaks as well as widespread fear and panic among Australia's population.

In the final analysis major outbreaks of infectious disease present formidable challenges to everyday life and to our Health System. Infectious disease and the associated fear and anxiety acknowledge no borders and the internationalisation of risks have made us all vulnerable. There is much that we have to learn about the emergence/re-emergence and spread of infectious disease, how ordinary people react, and how our Government continues to struggle in its attempt to control such outbreaks.