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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 04 Hansard (Wednesday, 31 March 2004) . . Page.. 1402 ..

for them. The longer we don’t use this vaccine, the more children that will come in with vaccine-preventable meningitis.

Pneumococcal disease is causing, and has the potential to cause, severe and lasting trauma to families and the young people who contract the disease. I will refer to two examples. The first is that of Canberra couple Stuart and Michelle Yeaman. The Yeaman’s 11-month-old son Cameron died from pneumococcal disease last year and doctors say that Cameron almost certainly would have lived had he been given the vaccine. The sad thing is the Yeamans would have gladly paid for the vaccine, but they did not know that it existed. During an interview on the ABC’s 7.30 Report in August of last year, Mr Yeaman said:

The vaccine has been out there for three years. If we had have known about it, we would have used it. If it had have been on the free list, we would have been given access to it in any case.

That is the awful truth. Many have heard about meningococcal and know to look for a rash, if they suspect their child may have contracted the disease, but here is another disease that very few have heard of, but it is more common than and just as deadly as the much publicised meningococcal.

There is an obvious need for the federal government not only to provide pneumococcal vaccine free to Australian children but also to provide parents and guardians with more information about pneumococcal.

The second case I would like to highlight is that of the Western Australian 14-year-old Ella Hitchen. Ella contracted pneumococcal when she was just nine weeks old. While she has survived, she now suffers severe cerebral palsy and is a severe spastic quadriplegic. As reported in The Australian newspaper in August 2003, Ella’s parents predicted that the community would have to spend $4.5 million on her care over her lifetime. That is an extraordinary cost both in financial terms and in terms of the loss of quality to Ella’s life because of the impact the disease has had and is having on both her and her family.

If the federal government followed the National Health and Medical Research Council’s recommendation, these sorts of traumas could be prevented. In fact, it has been estimated that the vaccine could prevent the hospitalisation of about 750 Australian children under the age of five annually.

In The Australian newspaper in September 2003, the President of the College of Physicians, Don Robertson, said that although the vaccine was expensive, it was worthwhile to prevent children dying or developing brain damage from pneumococcal. Here we have the AMA, the College of Physicians, the National Health and Medical Research Council, numerous doctors and many Australian families calling on the government to provide pneumococcal vaccine free to Australian children. To date, these calls have not been answered. That is why it is imperative that today the members of this Assembly support this motion. Pressure needs to be applied to the federal government. With the addition of the ACT Legislative Assembly to the list of organisations—and I understand there has been unanimous support from the South Australian Parliament—professionals and public supporters urging the case, hopefully the Howard government

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