The disease time bomb on our border

When I was advising Prime Minister Rabbie Namaliu (1988-92) I asked several times about the vaccination rates in PNG's children.

I was assured it was at around 70 per cent and that percentage was reasonable in a developing country. It would help overcome critical problems in the system as a whole. It did not overcome an appallingly low infant mortality rate.

Thanks to some refreshing honesty from the PNG Secretary for Health, we now know that the childhood vaccination rate has slipped to just THIRTY per cent. That is the national average. In some provinces the rate is just TWENTY per cent.

Papua New Guinea has a high birth rate. The largest population age grouping is between one and fifteen.

This is the group most exposed to the consequences of an appalling vaccination rate.

It's why measles and other diseases preventable by vaccination are escalating.

It is why even the insidious disease polio has returned to PNG.

Thirty years ago it had been eliminated in PNG, Today PNG now leads the world...and just not in children.

The Secretary says that in 2005 the vaccination rate was around 70 per cent. I doubt the accuracy of that, but let's assume it is about right.

How could it possibly decline to 30 per cent or less in the 18 years since?

Here is a key time. Until about 2013 Australia was the principal supplier of drugs and medicines to the PNG Health Department. The medicines were subsidised. And they were delivered reliably.

Inexplicably the PNG Government decided to purchase medicines and drugs from a private Southeast Asian supplier.