Christopher Back (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

This afternoon, here in the parliament, there will be a briefing to senators, members and staff on antibiotic resistance ahead of the global Antibiotic Awareness Week next week. I want to bring to the attention of the Senate and the community the risk that the world is now facing from antibiotic resistance, not just now but into the future. Firstly, let me present two statistics which I think are absolutely alarming. Health authorities in the United Kingdom predict that, if we do not get on top of the issue of antibiotic resistance, we will have at least 10 million more deaths per year in the world by 2050 and the cost in lost output, productivity and to society will exceed $100 trillion. That is 10 million more deaths. In the United States, the national medical strategy team have said that if we cannot guarantee antibiotic protection into the future it is likely that surgery, organ transplants and chemotherapy may not be able to be performed because of the failure to be able to provide antibiotic protection to those patients. Imagine a world where, now and into the future, we could not do surgery or give organ transplants or chemotherapy. Where would we be?

We are, of course, the architects of our own doom in this. Having been in the veterinary profession, and having been associated with animal production in the past, I can say that we have also been guilty of overuse of antibiotics. I remember, in the early 1970s, drug firm representatives running around the eastern wheat belt of WA saying to farmers, 'If you use low levels of antibiotics in your pig feed, your piggery will become a minimal disease piggery.' Of course, far from that, we learned that over time those animals were becoming resistant to commonly used antibiotics, and we have had instances around the world where people who had consumed the meat from animals that had been given antibiotics in their feedstuffs also became resistant to antibiotics. This is an issue that is of enormous importance to us in this place. I, for one, urge people to go along and listen this afternoon and participate next week in a series of seminars hosted by the ministers to elevate this problem.

The best example that I can give, and the one closest to Australia, is the now rampant antibiotic resistant tuberculosis. In Africa it is endemic. The worst affected country in the Pacific is our nearest neighbour, Papua New Guinea, where there are 25,000 new cases of TB being diagnosed every year. A very significant proportion of those—in fact, up to a third—are children. More regrettably, the treatment is usually not available because of the distances from villages to where treatment can be applied. Furthermore, for people suffering HIV-AIDS, normally the types of treatments available are not available or effective for them. As if we are not sufficiently concerned by the fact that it is happening in our nearest country, the ease of movement of people from Papua New Guinea through to the north of Australia at Cape York, needless to say, presents this problem for us here in Australia. Countries like Russia, Latvia, Ukraine and South Africa are homes of drug resistant, antibiotic resistant, tuberculosis. In fact, in many instances the deaths due to tuberculosis are probably actually due to HIV-AIDS in people who have tuberculosis and for whom it was sufficient to cause their demise.

On the positive side, I am very proud to record the fact that Australia has led and is leading in the eradication program for poliomyelitis. We are now within the shadows of the post of eradicating this disease. The chamber might be interested to know that there have only ever been two diseases that have been eradicated. The first was smallpox in human beings, eradicated in 1980, and the second was rinderpest, the disease of cloven-hoofed animals that was declared eradicated in 2011. How proud will the world be when we can actually declare, I hope within this decade, the eradication of polio. In Australia, in the 1950s and 1960s, there were between 10,000 and 20,000 cases of polio in this country alone. In 2013 there were 416 cases diagnosed in the world. By last year it was 359, and the number this year is 44.

Sir Clem Renouf, when he became president of Rotary International in 1978, became aware that the last case of smallpox had been diagnosed in 1977. That was the catalyst for him to commit Rotary International to take the lead in the eradication of polio, and he mentioned the comment of one of his successors. When this man was at a clinic watching children being vaccinated, he saw a small boy in calipers saying to one of the staff, 'Thank you for saving my sister, because she will not get what I have got.' Do you know what the cost of the vaccine is? It is 10c. I have pleaded with the Prime Minister and the foreign minister that, when they go to the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting next month or early next month in Malta, there be a declaration in the communique that says that the Commonwealth countries of the world want to move to the eradication of that terrible disease.

In the few minutes left to me I would like to talk about the notion of One Health. The forum is being held next week, on 17 November, here in Canberra, and I was proud to learn that it will be presented jointly by the Commonwealth departments of health and agriculture. As Senator Colbeck, who is sitting here, knows well, when we introduced and passed the new biosecurity bill earlier this year—replacing the Quarantine Act 1902—it was in fact a joint submission of government, by health and agriculture, that presented to the Senate committee. Why is this important? Because it needs to be understood that some 65 per cent of all infectious and parasitic diseases of humans have their origins in animals; 75 per cent of all new and emerging infectious diseases of humans have their origins in animals; and regrettably, for those terrorists who would be looking to the use of infectious agents to precipitate their cruelty on the world, more than 80 per cent of the organisms they are seeking—anthrax et cetera—are of animal origin. So I think it is very important that we are working ever more closely in that particular role.

In 2009 and, I think, 2010, two of my veterinary colleagues in Queensland died of the hendra virus, a virus having its origin in bats. Bats contaminate the feed of horses. In turn, the horses die and the people treating them or associated with their treatment also die. I think it was a wonderful exercise by this parliament and the three ministers at the time—health, agriculture and science; and I think Senator Carr was Minister for Science at the time—to commit sufficient funding to allow the Animal Health Laboratory at Geelong in Victoria to produce the hendra vaccine for horses in advance of it being produced, we hope one day, also for human beings. It is not that the morbidity, the number of cases, has been high; but the mortality, the percentage of those who got it, is 65 per cent—65 per cent of the humans who have contracted hendra virus have died from it.

I want to mention Rotary because I had the privilege of attending a function in Perth the other morning at which Barry Mendelowitz, a distinguished and now retired doctor in Perth, and his colleague Professor Tim Inglis pleaded that when Rotary is successful in leading the eradication of poliomyelitis in this country they not rest on their laurels but actually swing over and take a leading role in the whole question of antibiotic resistance. And the group led by Tim Inglis, Labs Without Walls, is doing enormous, world leading work particularly in the early diagnosis of organisms, the identification of organisms and, indeed, identifications of sensitivity or resistance by antibiotics. I conclude with this statement: antibiotic resistance is an international scourge that we must work on.