Mike Freelander (Macarthur, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'd like to commend the previous speakers, the member for Ryan and the member for Solomon, but most of all and in particular the member for Leichhardt, who has been a champion of the cause of eradication of tuberculosis for a number of years, and is doing all he can to promote this cause in the parliament and outside the parliament.

Tuberculosis is caused by an organism called Mycobacterium tuberculosis. There are other mycobacteria. One of the better known mycobacteria similar to the tuberculosis mycobacteria is Mycobacterium leprae, the cause of leprosy, which has all but been eradicated through most of the world. In the case of tuberculosis, when I was a medical student we assumed that tuberculosis was all but eradicated. In fact, I have a textbook here written by Selman Waksman, a name that you're probably not familiar with. Selman Waksman got the Nobel Prize for the development and discovery of streptomycin, one of the primary antibiotics used to treat tuberculosis. In this book he quotes someone as saying:

If I had tuberculosis … this idea, formerly terrifying, no longer makes anyone tremble ... antibiotics have appeared, sanatoria have disappeared; as far as the public is concerned the problem is solved; the disease has been conquered.

That was in 1964. Unfortunately, that has not proven to be the case. Whilst we know that tuberculosis is now more common in the developing world, it was formerly a disease in the developed world and its recurrence in the developed world, like Australia, is a major concern.

Many famous people died from tuberculosis, including Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, George Orwell, Andrew Jackson, the seventh American president, Vivien Leigh, Frederic Chopin, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder and first President of Pakistan, Franz Kafka, Eleanor Roosevelt, John Keats and DH Lawrence. Even King Tutankhamen was said to have died from tuberculosis.

We're now seeing the emergence of a multidrug-resistant tuberculosis bacteria. If I can take a step backwards, the treatment of tuberculosis—or consumption or the white plague, as it was previously known—included screening high-risk people, early detection and treatment, and vaccination. There is a vaccination called the BCG vaccine which is partially but by no means completely successful. Treatment regimens these days require multiple antibiotics, often up to a dozen tablets a day for six months. In multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, treatment may take up to three years. Imagine trying to manage tracing contacts and maintaining contact with medical personnel over a three-year period in a place like Myanmar, the highlands of New Guinea, Laos, Cambodia or Thailand. It is extraordinarily difficult. So treatment regimens these days in developing countries are very difficult. It's very hard to get compliance and it's very hard to do carrier tracing and follow-up of patients.

Our research focus now needs to be not only on better treatments and funding proper follow-up and tracing programs in developing countries but primarily on developing a vaccine that will be successful and easily transportable and usable in developing countries. Australia has been very good at providing funding for research, but we need to step up because this is not just a problem in the developing world; this is a problem in the developed world. We are now seeing an increased number of people with tuberculosis coming to Australia requiring treatment, not only in northern Australia but sometimes in other parts of Australia as well, with our migration and transport systems. So it's a problem for the whole world.

I support the member for Leichhardt and his call for the Australian government to increase its funding for the global fund and institutions like the Kirby Institute to try to improve our chances of having a vaccine developed in the next few years so that we can finally eradicate this terrible, dreadful disease which has been a scourge in times past. We don't want to see it come again.

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