00:01Days after Federal Health Minister Mark Butler said the origins of this diphtheria outbreak
00:06need to be examined, the Chief Health Officer and Health Minister of the Northern Territory
00:11have staged their first joint press conference on the outbreak, with at least one of the men
00:15welcoming Mark Butler's suggestion. Chief Health Officer of the Northern Territory Dr. Paul Burgess
00:20said he suspects the outbreak is linked to a case of diphtheria imported into North Queensland in
00:252022, a year when the state recorded 25 cases of the disease. He said the diagnosis coincided with
00:31a period of declining vaccination rates across Australia, a factor he said has also contributed
00:36to the boom in numbers across the NT this year. Speaking to the Federal Health Minister's comments,
00:41Dr Paul Burgess said the public has been let down by health systems and that NT Health would welcome
00:46an investigation into the origins of the current outbreak. Absolutely, we'd love to know how this
00:51happened as well. So we're in the situation of responding to this incursion of diphtheria and
00:57we'd like to get to a point of understanding as well how our Australian health protection
01:03systems have led us down and lead us to this situation. The NT Health Minister Steve Edgington
01:09has defended the government's response to the outbreak, saying that NT Health has been on
01:13the front foot the entire time, despite criticism from some Aboriginal health organisations about
01:18the speed of the government's response. The discussion comes as case numbers begin to slow
01:22in the Northern Territory, Dr Paul Burgess saying that at the height of the outbreak they were
01:26recording around 22 cases per week and that over the past seven days they've recorded just nine,
01:32bringing the case number total to around 150 in the Northern Territory and closer to 250 across Australia.
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