Vaccine success and challenges in northern Australia
Bianca F. Middleton A * , Jane Davies A B and Rosalind Webby C
+ Author Affiliations
- Author Affiliations
A Global and Tropical Health Division, Menzies School of Health Research, Charles Darwin University, PO Box 41096, Casuarina, NT, Australia.
B Department of Infectious Diseases, Royal Darwin and Palmerston Hospitals, Darwin, NT, Australia.
C Northern Territory Health, Darwin, NT, Australia.
Bianca Middleton is paediatrician at the Royal Darwin Hospital and PhD student at Menzies School of Health Research. Her research interests include rotavirus vaccines and vaccine preventable diseases of childhood. |
Jane Davies is the Co-Director of Infectious Diseases at Royal Darwin Hospital and a Principal Research Fellow at Menzies School of Health Research. Her research focuses on providing evidence to improve care for infectious diseases. |
Rosalind Webby is a Public Health Physician with NT Health and was previously Head of Immunisation at the Northern Territory Centre for Disease Control. |
* Correspondence to: bianca.middleton@menzies.edu.au
Microbiology Australia 43(3) 113-116 https://doi.org/10.1071/MA22036
Submitted: 16 June 2022 Accepted: 10 July 2022 Published: 25 August 2022
© 2022 The Author(s) (or their employer(s)). Published by CSIRO Publishing on behalf of the ASM. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND)
Abstract
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people living in rural and remote Australia have lower vaccine coverage rates and experience higher rates of notification and hospitalisations for vaccine preventable diseases than non-Aboriginal people. This paper explores important public health and research activities being undertaken in the Northern Territory to reduce this disparity in vaccine program performance, with a particular focus on rotavirus, meningococcal, human papilloma virus and COVID-19 vaccines.
Keywords: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, COVID-19, human papilloma virus, immunisation, meningococcal, Northern Territory, rotavirus, vaccine.
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