Diphtheria outbreak: residents of remote NT community say health clinic has no hand sanitiser

“There’s no hand sanitiser anywhere. I’ve seen people go to the clinic, wait one hour and then leave because no one is looking to help them,” he said.

NT Health did not respond when asked about claims the clinic was not providing hand sanitiser, or to claims that locals had not been provided with information about how to isolate to avoid spreading the disease.

In an earlier statement, a spokesperson for NT Health said the Yuendumu Health Centre remained open, and that “no locals have been refused health services”.

“NT Health continues to engage and consult with Aboriginal health organisations and primary care services to inform the community and increase vaccination,” they said. “This includes contact tracing, testing, regular education sessions with vaccine providers and increased vaccination in communities, including Yuendumu.”

Julie Watson has lived and worked in Yuendumu for two years as a programs coordinator for community welfare organisation Southern Tanami Kurdiji Indigenous Corporation. Watson said people in the community had been told to wait for up to three weeks to receive their results after testing for diphtheria, compared to just four days if tested at Alice Springs hospital.

“Everyone has been told that there is a three-week minimum wait before they get a result,” she said. “People are being told to isolate, but they are not being told how long they need to isolate for, so we don’t know. Like, what PPE we might need to wear, like gloves, masks or whatever. There’s been no education whatsoever for community.”

Watson said service providers in the town were not immediately told that they were facing a diphtheria outbreak.

“Nobody really knew what the sickness was, nobody from the health clinic let anybody know what it was,” she said. “Cases were increasing and we were hearing the plane fly in more than we would normally hear, so people were getting evacuated and nobody was quite sure why.

“I guess it eventually leaked from the clinic that it was diphtheria and given that it is such an old illness, we didn’t really know what that was because it hasn’t been around for a long time.”

The NT government did not issue a health alert about the outbreak until March, several months after the first cases were reported. It has since established pop-up vaccination clinics in Darwin, Katherine and Alice Springs and a mobile unit in central Australia. The Australian government also announced a $7.2m package to assist in the disease response, including $5.2m for a surge workforce to administer booster vaccinations. Public health ads have also been run in language on local radio stations and posters and infographics supplied to community-controlled health networks, the NT Health spokesperson said.

But Penhall says the response has not been clear enough.

“The government needs to let people know if these sorts of things happen,” he said.