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Rudd announces fever funding
Issue 194 - 05 Feb 2010
ISSUE 194, February 4, 2010: Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has told of his childhood struggle with rheumatic fever while announcing government funding to combat the disease, particularly among young Aboriginal people.
Visiting Darwin late last month, Mr Rudd said the federal government would provide more than $2.5 million over the next four years to the Menzies School of Health to prevent children contracting the potentially fatal form of heart disease.
"Rheumatic fever has by and large disappeared from non-Indigenous communities in Australia and it was a condition from which I suffered as a kid back in the 1960s and from which I then subsequently had bowel surgery," he told reporters.
"The fact that, here we are in 2010, and Indigenous communities are suffering this sort of incidence of rheumatic fever and its consequences is unacceptable."
Mr Rudd said Aboriginal children were more than 20 times more likely than non-Indigenous people to die from the disease.
Menzies School of Health director Jonathan Carapetis said rheumatic fever was a preventable disease that would not be eradicated until poverty no longer existed in Aboriginal communities. - AAP
 
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