YUENDUMU — More than 240 cases of diphtheria have been reported in Australia since October, primarily in remote Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory, South Australia, Queensland, and Western Australia. The Northern Territory government did not issue a health alert about the outbreak until March, several months after the first cases emerged.
Residents of Yuendumu, a community of about 700 people located 300km from Alice Springs, say they have received little information about the disease and face shortages of basic supplies. Eugene Penhall said he was only made aware of the diphtheria outbreak when he visited the health clinic for another matter and was given a vaccine without prior explanation of the disease. "The thing about this outbreak is that we’ve never been told what it is. How we live as Aboriginal people, we have 10 people in one house. They could be carrying this thing that we don’t even know about and it’s really, really bad." He added, "They just give me the vaccine and told me about this new thing [diphtheria] and I don’t even know what this thing does. I asked if this was like Covid but with this one, we’ve never been told to do anything. We’ve been living close to one another, walking around and doing normal stuff."
Julie Watson, programs coordinator for Southern Tanami Kurdiji Indigenous Corporation, said service providers in Yuendumu were not immediately informed that the community was facing a diphtheria outbreak. "Nobody really knew what the sickness was, nobody from the health clinic let anybody know what it was. 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." She also said people in Yuendumu have been told to wait up to three weeks to receive diphtheria test results, compared to four days if tested at Alice Springs hospital, and that there had been no education about isolation requirements or protective measures.
Ryan Woods said there had been no information on how to avoid the disease and added, "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." NT Health did not respond to questions about claims that the Yuendumu clinic lacked hand sanitiser or failed to provide isolation guidance. A spokesperson for NT Health said the Yuendumu Health Centre remained open and that "no locals have been refused health services."