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‘This really is an essential watershed moment’: is now the time for an Australian CDC?
Experts have been calling for an Australian centre for disease control for decades and now that campaign is ratcheting up. But what should an Australian CDC look like?
Download the free Guardian app; get our morning email briefingIn the 1990s, Australia suffered a meningococcal disease outbreak in three different jurisdictions across central Australia. “They all had different ways of dealing with it, even though in many cases there were members of the same family involved in different states and territories,” says Prof Lynn Gilbert, microbiologist and infectious diseases expert at the University of Sydney. It was back then, she says, that the need for a national disease surveillance and control agency became clear.
The campaign for the creation of a national disease surveillance agency in Australia, similar to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has been going for three decades and now, after two years of Covid-19 exposing cracks in the federated health system, it’s gathering pace.The Labor party is going into the upcoming election promising to establish an Australian Centre for Disease Control (CDC), and organisations including the Australian Medical Association, Australasian Society for Infectious Diseases and the Public Health Association of Australia all say it is past time for such a body.
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