Australia's notifiable diseases status 2006, is an annual surveillance report of nationally notifiable communicable diseases. Communicable disease surveillance in Australia operates at the national, state and local levels. Primary responsibility for public health action lies with the state and territory health departments. The role of communicable disease surveillance at a national level includes:
- identifying national trends;
- guidance for policy development and resource allocation at a national level;
- monitoring the need for and impact of national disease control programs;
- coordination of response to national or multi-jurisdictional outbreaks;
- description of the epidemiology of rare diseases, that occur infrequently at state and territory levels;
- meeting various international reporting requirements, such as providing disease statistics to the World Health Organization (WHO), and;
- support for quarantine activities, which are the responsibility of the national government.
Australia is a federation of 6 states (New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania, Victoria and Western Australia) and 2 territories (the Australian Capital Territory and the Northern Territory). State and territory health departments collect notifications of communicable diseases under their public health legislation. In 2006, the Australian Government Department of Health and Ageing (DoHA) did not have any legislated responsibility for public health apart from human quarantine. States and territories voluntarily forwarded data on a nationally agreed set of communicable diseases to DoHA for the purposes of national communicable disease surveillance.
Sixty-six communicable diseases (Table 1) agreed upon nationally through the Communicable Diseases Network Australia (CDNA) were reported to the National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System (NNDSS). The system was complemented by other surveillance systems, which provided information on various diseases, including some that are not reported to NNDSS.Top of page
Table 1. Diseases notified to the National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System, Australia, 2006
Data received from
|Hepatitis (NEC)||All jurisdictions|
|Hepatitis B (incident)||All jurisdictions|
|Hepatitis B (unspecified)*||All jurisdictions|
|Hepatitis C (incident)||All jurisdictions, except Queensland|
|Hepatitis C (unspecified)*,†||All jurisdictions|
|Hepatitis D||All jurisdictions|
|Campylobacteriosis‡||All jurisdictions, except NSW|
|Haemolytic uraemic syndrome||All jurisdictions|
|Hepatitis A||All jurisdictions|
|Hepatitis E||All jurisdictions|
|STEC, VTEC§||All jurisdictions|
|Highly pathogenic avian influenza||All jurisdictions|
|Severe acute respiratory syndrome||All jurisdictions|
|Viral haemorrhagic fever||All jurisdictions|
|Yellow fever||All jurisdictions|
Sexually transmissible infections
|Chlamydial infections (NEC)||||All jurisdictions|
|Gonococcal infection||All jurisdictions|
|Syphilis (all)¶||All jurisdictions|
|Syphilis – <2 years duration||All jurisdictions|
|Syphilis – >2 years or unspecified duration||All jurisdictions|
|Syphilis – congenital||All jurisdictions|
Vaccine preventable diseases
|Haemophilus influenzae type b||All jurisdictions|
|Influenza (laboratory confirmed)**||All jurisdictions|
|Pneumococcal disease (invasive)||All jurisdictions|
|Rubella – congenital||All jurisdictions|
|Varicella zoster (chickenpox)||All jurisdictions, except ACT, NSW and Victoria|
|Varicella zoster (shingles)||All jurisdictions, except ACT, NSW and Victoria|
|Varicella zoster (unspecified)||All jurisdictions, except ACT, NSW and Victoria|
|Barmah Forest virus infection||All jurisdictions|
|Dengue virus infection||All jurisdictions|
|Flavivirus infection (NEC)‡‡||All jurisdictions|
|Japanese encephalitis virus infection||All jurisdictions|
|Kunjin virus infection§§||All jurisdictions|
|Murray Valley encephalitis virus infection||All jurisdictions|
|Ross River virus infection||All jurisdictions|
|Australian bat lyssavirus||All jurisdictions|
|Lyssavirus (NEC)||All jurisdictions|
|Q fever||All jurisdictions|
Other bacterial infections
|Meningococcal infection¶¶||All jurisdictions|
* Unspecified hepatitis includes cases in whom the duration of infection could not be determined.
† In Queensland, includes incident hepatitis cases.
‡ Notified as 'foodborne disease' or 'gastroenteritis in an institution' in New South Wales.
§ Infection with Shiga toxin/verotoxin-producing Escherichia coli (STEC/VTEC).
|| Includes Chlamydia trachomatis identified from cervical, rectal, urine, urethral, throat and eye samples, except for South Australia, which reports only genital tract specimens; the Northern Territory, which excludes ocular specimens; and Western Australia, which excludes ocular and perinatal infections.
¶ Does not include congenital syphilis.
** Laboratory confirmed influenza is not a notifiable disease in South Australia but reports are forwarded to NNDSS.
‡‡ Flavivirus (NEC) replaced Arbovirus (NEC) from 1 January 2004.
§§ In the Australian Capital Territory, Murray Valley encephalitis virus infections and Kunjin virus infections are combined under Murray Valley encephalitis virus infections.
¶¶ Only invasive meningococcal disease is nationally notifiable. However, New South Wales, the Australian Capital Territory and South Australia also report conjunctival cases.
NEC Not elsewhere classifiedTop of page
The national dataset included fields for unique record reference number; notifying state or territory; disease code; age; sex; indigenous status; postcode of residence; date of onset of the disease; death, date of report to the state or territory health department and outbreak reference (to identify cases linked to an outbreak). Where relevant, information on the species, serogroups/subtypes and phage types of organisms isolated, and on the vaccination status of the case was collected. While not included in the national dataset, additional information concerning mortality and specific health risk factors for some diseases was obtained from states and territories.
Notification rates for each notifiable disease were calculated using 2006 mid-year resident population supplied by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (Appendixes 1 and 2). Where diseases were not notifiable in a state or territory, national rates were adjusted by excluding the population of that jurisdiction from the denominator. For some diseases, age adjusted rates were calculated using the indirect method of standardisation, with 2001 census data as the standard population.
The geographical distribution of selected diseases was mapped using ARCGIS software. Maps were based on the postcode of residence of each patient, aggregated to the appropriate Statistical Division (Map 1). Rates for the different Statistical Divisions were ordered into 6 groups — the highest value, the lowest value above zero, those equal to zero, and the intermediate values sorted into 3 equal-sized groups. The Statistical Divisions in the Australian Capital Territory were combined to calculate rates for the territory as a whole.
Map 1. Australian Bureau of Statistics Statistical Divisions and population, Australia, by Statistical Division, 2006Top of page
Australian Capital Territory
New South Wales
|110||Hunter||611,935||335||Central West||12,155||220||Central Highlands||150,412|
|125||Mid-North Coast||297,409||350||Far North||243,948||235||Loddon||178,091|
|140||Central West||181,374||405||Adelaide||1,138,833||250||East Gippsland||84,222|
|145||South Eastern||204,854||410||Outer Adelaide||125,903||255||Gippsland||169,133|
|150||Murrumbidgee||155,281||415||Yorke and Lower North||45,190||
|160||Far West||23,449||425||South East||63,580||510||South West||227,981|
|430||Eyre||34,979||515||Lower Great Southern||55,259|
|705||Darwin||113,955||435||Northern||77,105||520||Upper Great Southern||17,609|
|710||NT – balance||92,733||
|605||Greater Hobart||205,510||530||South Eastern||53,708|
* Includes Statistical Division 810 'Australian Capital Territory – balance'.
Information from communicable disease surveillance is disseminated through several avenues of communication. At the fortnightly teleconferences of the CDNA the most up-to-date information on topics of interest to the network is provided. The Communicable Diseases Intelligence (CDI) quarterly journal publishes surveillance data and reports of research studies on the epidemiology and control of various communicable diseases. Disease surveillance summaries from the NNDSS are published on the Communicable Diseases Surveillance section of DoHA's web site.Top of page
This issue - Vol 32 No 2, June 2008
NNDSS Annual report 2006