Norman Swan

And a lot of people who went to medical school think this is just actually in your throat.

And in the throat, it's a life-threatening condition.

You get this membrane in the back of the throat, which can block...

your breathing and particularly in children but you can also get myocarditis and inflammation of the heart and you can die of that too so it's a nasty nasty disease totally preventable with immunization but it's also it can also infect the skin and cause wound lesions

And just to explain the outbreak, some of the outbreak is skin lesions and other skin infection, but actually there have been a couple of respiratory cases.

So, I mean, this is really serious.

Yes.

And if we fall below the 90-95% rate of immunisation in the community, this could spread.

So, you've just got to be careful about this.

Another good news story, though, on immunisation.

Meaning nine different versions of the human papillomavirus.

Interestingly, that's not the main reason why boys were started to be immunized for HPV.

It goes back to the rubella story is what they discovered was because rubella being a pernicious infection when women become pregnant and you get congenital rubella, which is an awful disease.

I actually have seen a couple of cases and you just don't want to ever see another one in a little baby.

So they thought, well, we will just immunise girls against rubella.

And they found that, in fact, that didn't really control the disease.

You had to immunise boys as well to get that effect.

And HPV, it's even more important because boys infect girls with HPV.

It says it's a sexually transmissible disease.

So to really control human papillomavirus, you've got to immunise boys as well.