Zoe Wainer’s parents started the country’s first public abortion clinic. Now she is making history too, as the inaugural head of the Australian Centre for Disease Control
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In 1987 when the HIV pandemic was at its peak, the doctor and epidemiologist Prof Robert Douglas wrote a report for the Medical Journal of Australia describing how disease control was “fragmented, inadequate and poorly coordinated”, lamenting a lack of national coordination.
“Now is the time to begin to plan for a national system of disease control,” he wrote, calling for state and federal governments to share a strategy and “play their proper roles in the prevention of disease and the minimisation of its effects”.