It is indeed a pleasure to be here this morning to officially open such a distinguished gathering. This conference on vaccines and immunotherapy is part of a series of conferences supported by the Australian government through the International Science Linkages Program.
The Sir Mark Oliphant Conferences: International Frontiers of Science and Technology are named in honour of a great Australian scientist. Since the first conference in 2002, they have consistently brought together leading scientists from Australia and the rest of the world to discuss important multidisciplinary themes. I am sure this conference will be no exception.
Sir Mark Oliphant was a nuclear physicist whose achievements included the discovery of heavy hydrogen atoms and the ability to split them. But it is interesting to note that he began his university studies with the intention of pursuing a career in chemistry or medicine. The topics you will be considering over the next two and a half days demonstrate how far the fields of chemistry and medicine have changed since the time when Sir Mark Oliphant was considering them.
Since Edward Jenner first vaccinated for smallpox in 1798, vaccine and immunotherapy technologies have become a vital part of our medical armoury. Mass vaccination was a critical element in improving life expectancies in Australia and around the world in the 20th century, by controlling many infections, especially childhood diseases.
The impact that vaccine research, production and technology have made on public health in Australia and around the world should not be underestimated. Since the introduction of childhood vaccination for diphtheria in 1932, and the widespread use of vaccines to prevent tetanus, pertussis and poliomyelitis in the 1950s, deaths in Australia from vaccine-preventable diseases have virtually disappeared. The success of Australia’s vaccine programs ranks alongside the introduction of safe drinking water and sewage disposal, and the development of antibiotics is one of the major contributors to improved public health in the last 100 years.
The great success of our immunisation programs against childhood diseases led to a degree of complacency, and in the mid-1990s Australia was ranked 68th in the world for immunisation coverage. This has turned around, thankfully, with all states and territories currently recording more than 91 per cent coverage for infant immunisation at 12 months of age.
Retaining our high vaccine coverage is important in continuing to fend off infectious diseases like whooping cough, tetanus, diphtheria, measles, mumps, rubella and polio. But it is also important to continue to update our vaccine program. In recent years the Australian immunisation program for children has been expanded to include free vaccination against varicella (chickenpox), pneumococcal, meningococcal C, Haemophilus influenzae Type B, human papillomavirus and, most recently, rotavirus.
Of course it is not just Australia which has benefited from the protection provided by vaccination. Around the world millions of deaths have been prevented in the poorest countries by strengthening health and immunisation systems, accelerating access to selected vaccines and new vaccine technologies, and improving injection safety.
Australia is one of the 12 countries which have directly provided funding to the GAVI Alliance, formerly known as the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation, which was launched in 2000 to improve access to immunisation for children in impoverished countries. Around the world, GAVI estimates that almost three million lives have been saved each year since 1974 through immunisation, with 750,000 children saved from disability due to disease.
The microorganisms that cause disease are continually changing. The infectious diseases which have shaped human history, such as the plague, measles and influenza, have now been joined by new threats, such as HIV/AIDS, multi-drug resistant TB, malaria, hepatitis C, and BSE (mad cow disease) in animals and variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans. We have also seen new diseases emerge, especially zoonotic diseases such as SARS and avian influenza. Vaccine and immunotherapy research holds our best hope for staving off these threats. Intense research is under way into these diseases.
But today a great deal of research into the immune system and its response to pathogens is also targeted to other diseases which are not communicable in the traditional sense, such as cancer, asthma and diabetes. These are among the main causes of the rapidly rising burden of chronic disease in developed countries such as Australia, and present a major challenge to our health system.
The human body is a complex machine. Recent studies have suggested that regular physical activity or exercise has a positive impact not only on the body’s metabolic, cardiovascular and musculoskeletal systems, but also on the immune system. This is an exciting finding with important public health consequences. Many chronic diseases, as we know, are lifestyle-related. Without intervention, the so-called epidemic of obesity in this country will inevitably lead to an increase in these diseases. Physical exercise and good nutrition have already been identified as important elements in the management and prevention of lifestyle-related diseases. The Australian government is committed to prevention and to enhancing its role in the health system.
We are making it a priority to reorient our health system to put much more emphasis on prevention, with the aim of reducing chronic disease and of taking the pressure off our acute health system. We have already committed to a National Preventative Health Strategy to be developed by a National Preventative Health Taskforce, and the membership of that taskforce will be announced later today by the Minister. The taskforce will seek to tackle the looming burden of chronic diseases, with an initial focus on alcohol, tobacco and obesity.
We have also foreshadowed our intention to include a focus on preventative care in the new five-year Australian Health Care Agreements, which govern health funding to the state and territory governments. We will review the Medicare schedule with a view to introducing incentives to encourage longer GP consultations, where needed, to provide better preventative health care.
Also, we have committed up to $54 million to tackling obesity, including what will be a terrific program, the Kitchen Gardens Program, to 190 primary schools across Australia. We will highlight and upgrade the status of obesity prevention by making it a National Health Priority Area. We are determined to shift prevention from the margins to the centre of health care, a crucial part of building a health system for a modern country.
A major part of our prevention program will involve lifestyle changes and better early medical intervention. But these approaches will not replace the essential preventative role of vaccines, or the growing role of immunotherapy in disease treatment. Australian scientists are doing world-leading research in these areas, continuing our great tradition of breaking ground in this field.
In 1980 it was an Australian, Professor Frank Fenner, who declared to the World Health Assembly that, due to a dedicated global vaccination effort, smallpox had been wiped out. Professor Fenner made huge contributions in the areas of smallpox, malaria and myxomatosis.
It was, as we know, Australian Professor Ian Frazer – whom we look forward to hearing later this morning – who developed the world’s first vaccine to prevent cervical cancer, indeed the world’s first cancer vaccine for humans. Professor Frazer’s work over nearly 20 years identified human papillomavirus as the principal cause of cervical cancer. From April 2007, the Australian government has provided the new vaccine free to all women and girls between 12 and 26, through the National HPV Vaccination Program.
Australia’s Professor Barry Marshall and Dr Robin Warren received the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2005 for their research on stomach ulcers, which discovered a link between a previously unidentified spiral bacterium, Helicobacter pylori, and stomach and duodenal ulcers. The collaborative work performed by Professor Marshall and Dr Warren has revolutionised the treatment of these gastric conditions, and may hold the key to the development of vaccines against a number of diseases.
Another landmark in Australian vaccine and immunotherapy research was the 1973 discovery, by Dr Ruth Bishop, Dr Ian Holmes and colleagues from the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne, of rotavirus, a virus which kills half a million children around the world every year. Two oral live attenuated rotavirus vaccines have subsequently been developed. From July of last year, vaccine has been made available free of charge to all Australian babies, under the National Immunisation Program.
If I could digress for a moment: I am sure that epidemiologists around the place, and vaccine developers, will have developed scientific papers about the value of these vaccines and the saving of so many lives. But can I say it is also of economic value to the Australian community. I used to be involved in child care some years ago, and one of our child care centres was continually plagued by rotavirus. And every time we were told that someone had rotavirus, the result was that 50 mothers had to be rung up and told, ‘Come and collect your child, and stop work for about a week.’ So thank you for the work that you have done on behalf of the mothers of Australia who might be able to stay at work!
I am sure all Australians are proud of the achievements of our scientists and the continuing work by their many distinguished colleagues in microbiology, immunology and the related fields. Creating new vaccines will not be easy. All of the obvious, easy targets have already been hit. As the careers of these Australian scientists demonstrate, the breakthroughs in fighting these diseases stem from increasing our basic understanding of how the diseases themselves operate and interact with our immune system. We need to continue this basic immunological research to identify causes and how they might be targeted with vaccines. This applies to known diseases as well as new, emerging diseases.
This conference will provide an excellent platform for sharing this sort of knowledge between research and business, as well as stimulating constructive debate on the science of vaccine production and the practicalities of vaccine development, including new approaches and technologies.
This conference will allow Australia’s leading researchers and academics to meet their international counterparts and to exchange information cutting across international boundaries. The government hopes that the result will be to mobilise collaborative efforts and to foster development of new technologies through international cooperation and partnerships. The benefits of such a joint effort will be felt by health consumers not only here in Australia but right around the world.
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The Sir Mark Oliphant Conference Series is supported by the Australian Government under the International Science Linkages Program.
© 2008 Sir Mark Oliphant Conferences.
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