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

There’s a three-week wait on test results in Yuendumu, near Alice Springs, and locals say NT Health has dropped the ball on telling locals what to do if they test positive

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A remote Aboriginal community at the centre of the Northern Territory’s diphtheria outbreak is struggling to cope with rising case numbers, with locals saying there is no hand sanitiser at the health clinic and limited information about how to avoid the disease or what to do if you test positive.

There have been more than 240 cases of the once-eradicated disease reported in Australia since October, primarily in remote Indigenous communities in the NT, South Australia, Queensland and Western Australia , according to data released by the Australian Centre for Disease Control. One of the largest clusters in the NT is in Yuendumu, a community of about 700 people 300km from Alice Springs.

Yuendumu has a health clinic and community health centre but several locals have told Guardian Australia that the health clinic is often in an “unsanitary” state, with no hand sanitiser available. Despite the Territory government providing resources in several Indigenous languages, including Warlpiri, the language spoken in Yuendumu, locals say there is limited understanding about the disease in the community and little visibility of public health information.

Warlpiri man Eugene Penhall told Guardian Australia that locals were frustrated with the lack of information, particularly information that was applicable to daily life in a community where housing is overcrowded and living standards are poor .

“The thing about this outbreak is that we’ve never been told what it is,” Penhall said. “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.”

Penhall said he was only made aware of the outbreak when he went to the health clinic on another matter. “They ended up telling me about the vaccine, so I had to take it,” he said.

“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.”

Another local, Warlpiri man Ryan Woods, said the Royal Flying Doctor service has been flying into the community daily, compared to the weekly visits before the outbreak.

Woods said relatives living at his house had been infected with diphtheria, but that he was not staying there. He said there had been “no information on how we can stay away from it”.

“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.