Today marks the official start of operations of the Australian Centre for Disease Control as an independent national agency. The federal government promises the national centre will improve Australia’s response and preparedness for public health emergencies. Dr Paul Griffin is an infectious diseases expert from the University of Queensland.
00:00Look, absolutely. I mean, we're very fortunate in this country to have an excellent therapeutic
00:06health system, but our public health system is fragmented and inconsistent and not well
00:11resourced and this certainly changes that. So it's going to have a really big impact
00:14for the public health of everyone in this country.
00:17How will it improve the way that Australia's health system functions?
00:21I think it's really about having a coordinated centre to oversee so many important activities.
00:26So surveillance activities, data and analytics, communication in a one health approach,
00:32so including animals in the environment, so that we're much more prepared for future pandemics.
00:36And it's not really a question of if, but when.
00:38And so we'll have playbooks that will be based on that data, evidence based.
00:43And so we can deploy those much more quickly and people will know what to expect
00:46and what to do when the next pandemic arises.
00:49Yeah. So this centre is really a response to the lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic.
00:54What were the gaps that we saw emerge there?
00:57Look, there were so many gaps and really momentum for this started well before COVID.
01:02In fact, HIV was probably a big driver for moves to try and have a CDC, but COVID certainly accelerated that.
01:07And I think we've seen so many gaps in what we did with COVID.
01:11I think that the lack of clarity and consistency, I think different states having different measures,
01:16really undermined people's confidence in what was being recommended when it was so vastly different state to state.
01:21And we didn't have good data that was being shared reliably.
01:24And so we really didn't have a good visibility over what was going on.
01:28And the CDC will hopefully fix all of those things.
01:30So for day to day things like influenza and COVID, we'll be in a much better position.
01:36But when the next pandemic comes, we'll be really well positioned to manage that well.
01:40Yeah. I mean, that was going to be my next question.
01:42In another pandemic situation or similar health crisis, how will the CDC in its new current form be able to improve our responses?
01:51Look, there'll be so many ways. Surveillance, so hopefully we'll identify things a little bit earlier.
01:57Having those playbooks in terms of the preparedness that's underway already so that we can rapidly roll those out and people will know how we're going to combat that next pandemic.
02:05The ability to share information so we know exactly where the greatest levels of activity are, so we can focus our resources there, for example.
02:13We can adapt things like vaccines and deploy those much more quickly.
02:17And I think the communication piece, restoring trust in public health, making sure everyone knows what's happening and what we need them to do about it to prevent the spread of whatever pathogen it is.
02:28So there'll be so many ways the CDC will be instrumental in improving how we respond to future pathogens.
02:33Yeah, we've long heard criticisms about how fragmented aspects of our public health system are.
02:39Can you just speak specifically to information sharing and how critical it is that that happens in a well-managed way?
02:47Absolutely. And, you know, different states collect different data in different ways.
02:51They share information in different ways. So there's so many gaps in our surveillance systems for all of our communicable diseases at the moment.
02:59And so that will largely be addressed by the CDC. We'll be able to get information much more quickly in a standardised way across jurisdictions
03:07and be able to report that in a way that's really useful to the general public, but also to those who are in charge of the response.
03:13And so that will mean we can have a targeted, data-driven, evidence-based response that will be clearly communicated so everyone knows what's going on and we can optimise that response so it's much more effective, as well as being cost effective and efficient.
03:27The CDC will be an independent body, so in theory free from political interference, but we only have to look to the US to see that political interference can happen to a supposedly independent CDC.
03:40How do we protect against politicisation?
03:43It's a great question. So this is an independent agency. It will operate independently. We have seen other countries not be able to do that quite as successfully, particularly in recent times.
03:53But the CDC here in Australia has been set up to operate independently. There's legislation to that effect and that's certainly the plan.
04:01And I'm confident that that will continue to be the case because that is really important for it to continue to operate independently, for people to have faith and trust in what it's doing and that it's not influenced by politics in any way.
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