In Disease Elimination, our aim is to reduce the number of people being infected with or suffering from a disease down to a level where the impact of that disease is no longer a public health concern, but able to be managed by health systems operating under normal conditions.
Through this program, Burnet aims to:
- Eliminate public health threats posed by several serious infectious diseases in Australia and globally aligned with disease elimination targets set by the World Health Organization
- Reduce the prevalence of hepatitis C in Australia by 50 percent and stop new Australian HIV transmissions
- Make a major contribution to malaria elimination in the Indo-Pacific region
- Increase the capacity of health professionals, researchers, policy makers and the general community through education and training to achieve a reduction in harms related to alcohol and drugs in Australia and globally.
- Promote improved health and wellbeing by reducing harms related to alcohol and other drugs and sexual and mental health
Our program has three streams: infectious disease elimination, healthy ageing and chronic diseases, and harm and risk reduction.
To make disease elimination possible, we work through combination of interventions that may include vaccines, treatment strategies and testing, to understand who’s got a particular chronic disease or infection, and research ways we can reduce people suffering from that condition in the first place.
We operate via a two-way pipeline where our research discoveries can be tested in the field, and field programs inform discovery research through our long-standing connections with vulnerable target populations in Australia, Papua New Guinea, Myanmar, China and in other African, Asian and Pacific countries.
