Luke Gosling (Solomon, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I second the motion. I commend the member for Leichhardt on this motion, which draws attention to the terrible disease of tuberculosis. As we all know, because he does a good job, he's the co-chair, with Senator Singh, of the Australian TB Caucus. It is a group of some 20 parliamentarians, including my good friend the member for Macarthur, who is himself a health professional and very passionate about us doing more to combat this deadly disease.

Before going to Timor-Leste, I had assumed that TB was one of these diseases that had been eradicated and was no longer a problem. However, my travels in Timor-Leste and further in our region showed that this was not the case. As set out in the member for Leichhardt's motion, TB is the world's leading infectious disease killer. In 2017, 1.6 million people died from TB and 10 million people became sick. That's a shocking statistic for a disease that is both curable and preventable.

I support this motion because it recognises Australia's contribution to the fight against TB, particularly in our region, particularly in Papua New Guinea and in Timor-Leste. We must do more. The motion calls on the Australian government to monitor progress on meeting UN targets to reduce and eventually eradicate TB, and to increase our financial support of the Global Fund at its replenishment conference in October this year.

I have a particular interest in TB in relation to my electorate of Solomon, in the Northern Territory. Regrettably, we still have confirmed cases of TB in the Territory, but, thanks to the good work of the NT government Centre for Disease Control, the CDC, they are trending downwards from the annual numbers that were in the 30s and 40s in the 1990s to numbers in the 20s more recently. The incidence of TB in the NT Aboriginal population is decreasing, but the rates in people born overseas are increasing.

This is why we need to support efforts to tackle TB globally and particularly in our region. In Papua New Guinea, there were an estimated 33,000 cases of TB in 2015. Timor-Leste has the highest prevalence of TB of any country in our region.

The Menzies School of Health Research in Darwin, in my electorate, is leading a consortium with institutions in Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and Malaysia with the Burnet Institute, of Melbourne, to address the challenges of drug-resistant TB and malaria, which pose major threats to health security in the Indo-Pacific region. This two-year Australian government program called the Tropical Disease Research Regional Collaboration Initiative: Responding to Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis and Malaria in the Asia-Pacific—it's quite a name—aims to strengthen health systems and research capacity, including high-quality operational research, to prevent and contain malaria and TB. This commendable program has a very human focus.

Dr Josh Francis, a paediatrician from Royal Darwin Hospital and the Menzies school, does a lot of work in Timor-Leste. Josh told me of one recent tragic case. He examined a very sick child with seizures, weight loss and fever. Her CT scan showed that she had TB in her brain, one of the more devastating complications of TB infection in children but still treatable if it is picked up early enough. He went to her bedside to see her and her family, but, as he started to examine this young girl, she suddenly stopped breathing. Along with a team of Timorese doctors and nurses, he tried to resuscitate her, but, sadly, she passed away that morning.

This should not have happened. This child had been in contact with TB well before she got sick. If that had been known, she could have had preventive treatment, six months of a medicine called Isoniazid, which could have—

Dr Freelander interjecting—

Thanks for the pronunciation assistance! The member for Macarthur will clarify the pronunciation of that drug. But the point is that it could have prevented any of this from happening. These sorts of cases happen all too often, sometimes diagnosed, sometimes not.

Of course, there are good stories too, cases that are picked up and treated well, and then those afflicted go on to survive and thrive. There's a lot more we can do, and I thank again the member for Leichhardt for putting this forward.

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