A nurse administers a vaccine to a patient in 2021. Diphtheria cases are declining in Australia’s Northern Territory after a vaccine blitz that involved immunizing more than 10,000 people. File Photo by Debbie Hill/UPI | License Photo
Health officials in Australia said Tuesday that testing showed a man’s death in April was caused by diphtheria, the first such death in the country since 2018.
Officials in Australia’s Northern Territory declared a diphtheria outbreak in March, but there have also been cases in Western Australia, South Australia and Queensland. There have been 245 cases in 2026, with 163 cases in the Northern Territory, officials said. Many of the cases are in more remote Indigenous communities.
“Our government has taken this situation very seriously, and we are working hard to understand the causes and working to contain the situation,” Steve Edgington, the Northern Territory’s health minister, told the BBC.
The NT government said that cases were declining after a vaccine blitz that involved immunizing more than 10,000 people, NT Chief Health Officer Paul Burgess told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
“That’s a fantastic effort in a short period of time and shows great participation and partnership approach between our colleagues at [Aboriginal Medical Services Alliance Northern Territory] and community-controlled heath services and NT Health clinics,” he said.
Diphtheria, a bacterial infection, can damage the heart, kidneys and other bodily systems and can be deadly, especially in children. It is generally rare in developed countries because of widespread vaccination. There are respiratory and cutaneous (affecting the skin) strains.
Burgess said diphtheria had been “largely eradicated” in Australia by immunization campaigns in the 1940s but that vaccination rates around the world have been falling since the COVID-19 pandemic and dropped below 90% in some of NT’s remote Aboriginal communities. The strain causing this outbreak was likely imported into Queensland in about 2022, he said.
“What we’re seeing now, thankfully, is a really good community response, particularly around the diphtheria vaccine campaign, and people are coming forward requesting the vaccine,” Burgess said.
