In Indigenous health, it's one of the rare success stories.
While access to primary health care remains poor, and life expectancy rates at birth are up to 17 years lower than their non-Indigenous counterparts, health experts cite vaccination programs in indigenous communities as a stand-out achievement.
Dr Robert Menzies, Deputy Director of Surveillance at the National Centre for Immunisation Research (NCIR), says immunisation campaigns in remote areas of central and northern Australia have delivered visible improvements to the health of many communities. “There have been really spectacular impacts on a whole number of diseases that used to be devastating in that part of the world.”
Until a vaccine was introduced in 1993, Aboriginal children in Australia had the highest rate of Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib) in the world, a disease which can cause deafness and intellectual impairment along with a number of other medical complications.
Now, Dr Menzies says, the number of cases reported today is so small “you could fit them on one hand.”
Another, more recent example is Hepatitis A, with a program that began just seven years ago in 2005. “In remote areas, particularly in the Northern Territory, we had this situation where all Indigenous people got Hepatitis A. Now, the disease has almost disappeared.”
The success of disease removal in Indigenous communities presents a contrast to a growing prickle of discontent towards vaccination in the broader Australian population.
Pockets of low coverage for preventable illnesses such as whooping cough have been recorded in the greater metropolitan areas of Australian cities including Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth.
Dr Menzies says the benefits of vaccination are clear in the populations most affected by preventable diseases.
“We haven't seen evidence of [opposition to vaccination] in Indigenous communities, and my opinion of why that is, is if people are consciously aware – if they're exposed to seeing people with disease – they tend to be more enthusiastic about preventative measures.”
“It's really in the more affluent urban areas where people are quite healthy and don't see these diseases they tend to be more open to questioning why they need it.”
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