HIGH FLYERS THINK TANK

Emerging diseases – Ready and waiting?

The Shine Dome, Canberra, 19 October 2004

Opening address

Professor Mark von Itzstein
Executive Director and Federation Fellow, Institute for Glycomics, Griffith University, Queensland

May I also add my welcome to you all, on top of Gerry's. I know the Academy has a longstanding tradition now in the development of these sorts of think tanks, and there are a few things I want to say about that.

The first is to ask what impact these think tanks have on government policy decision-making. What impact are we going to generate from your discussions today to drive, we hope, government initiatives and policy? If I reflect on the previous think tanks, the most recent concerned ‘Safeguarding Australia' and I am sure that you realise that there is significant policy written around safeguarding Australia. The first think tank was around ‘Setting National Research Priorities', and there was a range of themes that came up that are directly reflected in what the government policy has delivered in terms of the National Research Agenda.

Those policies were formed on the back of the reports that were directed from these sorts of think tanks – very, very important. So I must say that we should take this seriously and the discussions, I am sure, will be conveyed to Canberra and indeed listened to.

I should congratulate, all of the participants selected to attend this think tank. I have only been recently aware of the competition for selection of participants through various councils, Deputy Vice-Chancellors Research, indeed Fellows of the Academy et cetera. So congratulations to those of you who have been selected as early- or mid-career researchers.

The breadth of the audience has caught me by surprise. We don't only have scientists amongst us in the traditional sense, in the usual disciplines of chemistry and biology; we have people from as far afield as legal matters, right through to a more bioinformatics, mathematics orientation. So the breadth of the audience is also quite extensive.

The purpose of an opening address is to try to gee you up and set the scene for what this session is really going to be about. It is clearly trying to address, as Gerry has indicated, a number of questions.

How would Australia deal with an emerging disease that was of rapid onset? How would we deal with it? We have had this sort of scenario placed before us not so long ago with SARS, for example. Coronavirus before then was a rather innocuous virus, I would suggest to you. Not many people, on the street at least, would have thought, ‘Wow, this is a major virus that could cause significant disease.' That has changed. So you could well imagine that there is a whole range of other bacteria and viruses and parasites that the average person on the street is not aware of also, but if they become particularly virulent people then certainly do become accustomed or used to the language that appears in the press, for example.

We need to know, as a scientific community, how we would deal with such an issue, and I feel that this think tank can actually provide some significant direction in that regard.

I guess in a sense it also needs definition: what is an emerging disease? And Gerry nicely said that perhaps we should be thinking not only about emerging diseases but about well-established diseases, for example malaria, that have been around for many years now but we still do not have a solution to. Tuberculosis is considered an emerging disease, even though it has been around for a long time, simply because of the multi-drug resistant strains that have arisen.

I think internationally we also need to be aware and to discuss how other countries are dealing with these sorts of issues of emerging diseases. I can report to you, for example, that there is a major international consortium being formed around viral diseases, headed up by Canada at this point in time, which we hope to be a part of. It is going to involve a whole range of countries. So is it an international consortium, or consortia, that we should be joining on the various aspects of these emerging diseases?

The topics today are broad-ranging and cover all of those things that you would expect when considering emerging diseases – not just human health but animal health, of course, plant health and aquatic health, all very important, particularly to Australia, given that we are a small island in this world.

So I hope that you all get a significant amount of contribution and information out of today's agenda. It is rather jam-packed, I must say, but once again we hope that through discussion this group will come forward with some words that will actually help our government in driving policy forward.