Canberra, May 21 (IANS) The Australian government is delivering a 7.2-million-Australian-dollar (about 5.14 million US dollars) package to respond to the biggest diphtheria outbreak since national record-keeping began, the country’s Health Minister, Mark Butler, said on Thursday.The National Notifiable Disease Surveillance System reports 230 diphtheria cases this year, and around 60 per cent of the cases in this outbreak are in the Northern Territory, with further outbreaks in Western Australia,…
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Canberra, May 19 (IANS) A diphtheria outbreak in Australia’s Northern Territory has become one of the country’s largest in decades and is spreading into the neighbouring states of Queensland and South Australia, health authorities said on Tuesday.A total of 133 cases have been recorded in the Northern Territory since the outbreak began, alongside six cases in South Australia and up to five in Queensland, according to the National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System.Health Minister Mark Butle…
Canberra, April 3 (IANS) The Australian federal government will not make changes to its subsidization scheme for medications amid tariff pressure from the US administration, said Mark Butler, the health minister, on Friday.Butler told Seven Network television that Australia will not negotiate with the United States on the “fundamentals” of the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS), under which the federal government subsidizes the cost of prescription medicines, Xinhua news agency reported.”We ke…
Canberra, Jan 30 (IANS) Australia’s health minister said on Friday that the government is closely monitoring the outbreak of the Nipah virus in Asia.Mark Butler told Nine Network television that the Nipah virus has never been detected in Australia, but that authorities were taking the threat posed by an outbreak that began in India in December very seriously.”The Indian authorities tell us they’ve got that outbreak under control, but nonetheless, we’re monitoring it very, very closely, because t…