Page 1665 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 15 May 2019
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alone. Notifications of infectious syphilis have also increased significantly in recent times, jumping from 13 notifications in 2016 to 33 in 2017.
Notifications of gonorrhoea have also increased each year since 2015. The rate of gonococcal disease was 36 per 100,000 people in 2015. Last year it was 78 per 100,000 people. To quote the ACT’s former Chief Health Officer, Dr Paul Kelly, gonorrhoea is increasing and worryingly so. In parts of Australia, gonorrhoea is increasingly becoming drug resistant.
Bloodborne viruses also remain prevalent in our community. Last year there were seven newly acquired cases and 132 unspecific cases of hepatitis C in the ACT, plus 81 unspecific notifications of hepatitis B. In 2015 and 2016, 43 HIV cases were reported, with 13 new infections in 2017 and eight new infections in 2018. We also know that across the board there are a significant number of people who are not diagnosed. “Not diagnosed” means that they are not being treated, and this has consequences for themselves and potentially for others. These are all issues which are not going away.
Madam Speaker, we are very lucky that the ACT is well-served by a collaborative, engaged NGO and government sector in this space which delivers extraordinary bang for its buck in its efforts to improve awareness, to better educate, to achieve high rates of testing and simply to get positive outcomes for people from all walks of life.
The ACT has a good track record over decades of collaboration and innovation among all of these organisations, in addition to their individual achievements. These organisations include the Aids Action Council, which provides a range of services including health promotion, counselling, peer support programs for impacted communities, and advice on measures to prevent HIV.
It includes Sexual Health and Family Planning ACT, or SHFPACT. It delivers a diverse set of services in sexuality and relationships and reproductive and sexual health. It does this in a complex funding environment that includes direct clinical care; individual and group counselling; workforce development and training for the health, education and community service sectors; schools and community education; health information; and health promotion projects. SHFPACT’s strength is in this integration of services and the breadth of its perspective on these issues.
Organisations like Hepatitis ACT provide a range of prevention, health promotion and peer education programs, as well as treatment support for people affected by hepatitis. There is also the Canberra Sexual Health Centre in Garran, which provides free STI and BBV testing on an appointment or walk-in basis, plus a range of other important services and outreach activities.
The startling statistics that I mentioned before are not a reflection of the existing services in the ACT. I think it is pretty clear that these services are extraordinary and without them the situation would be much worse. But sexual health is a challenging space and one in which those challenges are, paradoxically, both constant and changing.
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