Call for disease control centre

AUSTRALIA needs a Centre for Disease Control to provide timely and independent advice to governments, health experts say

AUSTRALIA needs a Centre for Disease Control to provide timely and independent advice to governments on managing flu pandemics, vaccine side-effects and increasing rates of sexually transmitted disease, health experts say.

A Communicable Disease Control conference in Canberra has been told Australia is one of the few developed nations without such an agency.

Public Health Association chief Michael Moore said the need for such a body became apparent last year when the seasonal influenza vaccine was implicated in a spate of febrile convulsions in children.

An independent disease control agency responsible for routine surveillance of adverse events after immunisation would have picked up the problem earlier and provided experts to pinpoint the issue, a discussion paper says.

The paper, released at the conference yesterday, said a centre would collate scientific advice on communicable disease control, identify emerging disease and vaccination issues, provide technical leadership, write disease-control protocols and guidelines, co-ordinate communicable disease emergencies and train workers in disease control.

It is estimated such a body, to be funded by state and federal government, would cost more than $30 million a year.

Australian Chief Medical Officer Jim Bishop, however, told the conference that Australia already had comprehensive national systems to identify and respond to outbreaks of communicable disease.