I worried about a lot of things in the journey to become a mum.
When I was 31, a doctor finally told me I had stage 4 Hodgkin lymphoma. I say “finally” because it had taken three doctors and 18 months to get there. 18 months of my body sending me signals I didn’t yet know how to read.
Becoming a mum was not a given for me. Incredibly after chemotherapy, I became a mother to the most beautiful boys, twice.
And then, like every mum, I started worrying about a whole new set of things.
What colour should we paint the room? Are they eating enough? What kind of sleep routine should we follow? Am I doing any of this right? And of course, how do I keep them healthy?
Like every household, we’ve done the rounds of childhood bugs. The sniffles, the rashes, the “is this normal?” moments at 2am.
But polio? Polio has never once made my worry list. Not even a flicker. I’d guess it hasn’t made yours either.
Living in Australia, we are one of all but two countries in the world where wild polio has been eradicated. The last reported case of wild poliovirus in Australia was in the 1970s; before I was born.
This week I took both kids for their scheduled vaccines, which include polio coverage, and that was probably the only time the word has come up with our doctor.
But I now understand that’s a luxury. And luxuries are not evenly distributed. Because just across the water, that’s not the reality.
In August last year, a four-year-old boy from Lae, Papua New Guinea was paralysed by polio. It was among the first cases in the country since 2018, which itself broke an 18-year run of being polio-free. More than 31 cases were reported in that same month.
Papua New Guinea is our closest neighbour. Lae is closer to Cairns than Cairns is to Sydney.
Tonight, there are mothers in PNG going to sleep with a worry on their list that I have never had to carry. That shouldn’t be the case. Not because mothers shouldn’t worry – we always will – but because polio doesn’t need to be on that list. We have the tools. We have the knowledge. We have, agonisingly, almost finished the job of eradicating it forever.
I know that Australians understand finishing the job of eradicating polio is the right thing to do. We know that children in countries across the Pacific and further afield shouldn’t suffer from such a devastating yet preventable disease.
We also understand that eradicating polio is our job to do. The journey from vaccine to eradication has been a 70 year project passed down from generation to generation. We have been gifted the privilege of being the generation who finally eradicates polio from the worry list of every parent for all time.
With Polio re-emerging at our doorstep, there can now be no doubt that eradicating polio is also the smart thing to do.
The risk of a polio outbreak in Australia is low, but any re-emergence of the disease would be a giant step backward.
The risk is also real. Since the outbreak in PNG midway through last year, Australia’s Polio Expert Panel tasked the Victorian Infectious Diseases Reference Laboratory with conducting weekly wastewater testing for Polio in northern Queensland.
Right now, our human project to eradicate polio is under pressure. The United States has massively cut its global health funding. The United Kingdom has just announced that it will end its support for the Global Polio Eradication Initiative; even though that same week, poliovirus was detected in London sewage.
Yet, Australia has held firm. Our government is continuing to fund polio eradication efforts in PNG and the region. And so they should, because it is the right thing, our thing and the smart thing to do. It makes me proud of our country.
This week marks World Immunisation Week. I didn’t know that when I took my kids for their vaccines, because our access has never been in question. But for mums across our region, it marks the closest we’ve ever come to eradicating polio from the worry list for good.
We have the tools. We have the knowledge. We just need to decide that this is the generation that finishes it.
I didn’t have to put polio on my worry list. Let’s make sure no mother ever has to again.