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In 1987 when the HIV pandemic was at its peak, the doctor and epidemiologist Prof Robert Douglas wrote a report for the Medical Journal of Australia describing how disease control was “fragmented, inadequate and poorly coordinated”, lamenting a lack of national coordination.

“Now is the time to begin to plan for a national system of disease control,” he wrote, calling for state and federal governments to share a strategy and “play their proper roles in the prevention of disease and the minimisation of its effects”.

Almost 40 years later, and after numerous pandemics including swine flu, mpox and seasonal influenza during which peak medical and health bodies and experts repeatedly called for a centre for disease control, Australia finally has one.

In January, the Australian Centre for Disease Control (CDC) was established as a statutory, independent commonwealth authority to oversee national health surveillance, pandemic preparedness and public health advice, with Prof Zoe Wainer at its helm as director general.

After decades of pressure and debate over what an Australian CDC should be, Wainer says she “absolutely jumped at” the opportunity to lead it.

“It’s an extraordinary opportunity and investment that the nation’s made to keep Australia safe from public health threats and emergencies,” she says.

“The role is to ensure that Australia is never surprised by a health threat, never isolated in responding to a health threat, and always contributing to a stronger regional and global public health system.”

Despite high expectations, and concerns about the CDC’s budget and remit, she says stakeholders have so far been overwhelmingly hopeful and supportive.

Wainer has taken the role at a time when misinformation is contributing to a resurgence of preventable diseases such as measles, and as climate change drives the spread of infections like Japanese encephalitis beyond the Torres Strait and on to the mainland.

She hopes that the CDC’s independence from government and commitment to transparent data and advice sharing will be enough to counteract what the director of CSIRO’s health and biosecurity unit, Prof Brett Sutton, has described as a “very substantial threat”.

“It’s a really challenging area for all of us,” Wainer says.

“I think transparency is a really important part [of the solution to misinformation] … to have that conversation with the community and not expect them to necessarily take on what we say. We have to be able to understand what the concerns of community are.

“We’re pretty confident that as we build the CDC, we will work very closely with our stakeholders to try to understand, if there is a lack of trust, what might be driving that.”

She would not be drawn into the decimation of the US CDC by Donald Trump, in which unqualified people have been appointed to senior roles, spreading misinformation and harmful advice. “Their decisions that are matter for the United States government,” she says.

In its first years of operation, Australia’s CDC will focus on connecting state and federal data surveillance and monitoring, with a lack of real-time data sharing identified as a weaknesses of Australia’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

“It’s a big project of ours to really try to bring that data linkage together,” she says.

Another core focus will be on “One Health” – an approach that recognises the health of humans, domestic and wild animals, and the wider environment are linked and interdependent, and that experts across these sectors must collaborate if disease is to be prevented and controlled.

It’s why collaboration with First Nations people and organisations will be critical to the CDC’s work, Wainer says.

“My understanding, from speaking to many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, is that they’ve understood that deep connection between land, water, climate, people and animals for tens of thousands of years,” she says.

Wainer, who has a clinical background as a cardiothoracic surgeon and a master’s of public health, says her work always been strongly informed by a social justice lens.

Growing up, “social justice was by far the most important thing that the family was committed to”, she says.

Her father, Dr Bertram Wainer, was a doctor and prominent women’s health advocate who campaigned to make abortion safe and accessible. In the late 60s and 70s, he exposed corruption involving police, politicians and illegal abortion networks, and established Australia’s first public abortion clinic.

These efforts resulted in him facing serious threats to his life.

Wainer’s mother, Dr Jo Wainer, helped to establish the clinic, appalled that so many women were being subject to unsafe abortions performed by unqualified, and corrupt people.

After her husband died, she established a multidisciplinary women’s health clinic. A social scientist, she researched the experience of women rural doctors and sex differences in health and medical research – also a key focus of her daughter’s career. She also worked as a journalist for the ABC.

“Mum and Dad did extraordinary work in the name of public health,” Wainer says. “I always end up in public health in my career. It’s just been a trajectory.”

Wainer’s father died when she was 13, and she says “I have no doubt he’d be very proud” to see her leading Australia’s first CDC. Her mother, who turns 80 this year, remains an advocate for women’s health and wildlife causes.

While working as a surgeon, Wainer did seven outreach trips to lower and middle income countries to operate on children with congenital disorders and rheumatic heart disease, an entirely preventable disease found in the most disadvantaged areas of developing countries in Africa, the Middle East and central and south Asia, but also in Australia, in remote Indigenous communities.

Before leading the CDC, she was deputy secretary for community and public health in the Victorian department of health, leading one of Australia’s largest public health divisions, and conducting Australia’s first inquiry into women’s pain.

“I’ve always looked at next career moves as: ‘How can I take the skills, my attributes, my experience, and contribute it to the best benefit of my community?’” Wainer says.

“When the opportunity came up to be the inaugural director general for the Australian Centre for Disease Control, I absolutely jumped at it, because it meets that kind of internal value set that I have.”