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Oceania Paul Wright

Australia

updated Apr 20, 2010 by Nick Thorp

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Country Correspondent
Paul Wright


Overview


View Australia in a larger map Legend: = Government Agency, = NGO, = University, = Professional Society, = Poison Control Center, = Toxic Site.

Australia is a continent of great biodiversity and natural resources, with a predominantly dry climate that makes environmental sustainability a constant issue. Its population of 20 million is mainly concentrated in coastal urban and industrial centres. Mining, agricultural and livestock industries are major export contributors and important chemical users.

Medicinal toxicity

During the early part of the 20th century, there was a general acceptance in Australia that therapeutic compounds provided great benefits and their potential risks were not emphasised. Nonetheless, there were some notable local episodes of medicinal toxicities, including the chronic overuse between the 1950s and 1970s of very popular analgesic "APC" powders (a mixture of aspirin, phenacetin and caffeine) that produced gastric ulcers and an epidemic of chronic renal failure ("analgesic nephropathy") in Australia.1 However, it was the thalidomide episode in Australia (marketed between 1957-61), which led to the establishment in 1963 of the Australian Drug Evaluation Committee (ADEC) as an independent committee to advise on drug safety. The Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA, Australian equivalent to FDA) and ADEC have since played a pivotal role in the genesis of Australia's drug regulatory system.

The recent rapid increase in public use and access to complementary medicines, resulting in both adverse reactions and interactions with pharmaceuticals, has raised concerns throughout Australia about the appropriate regulation of these therapies. This led to the establishment of a specific evaluation committee within the TGA in 1997, and additional government reforms and regulations followed. During 2003, in what may be the world's largest medicines recall, the TGA withdrew over 1,300 complementary medicine products marketed by Pan Pharmaceuticals, Australia's largest contract manufacturer of complementary medicines at that time. The recall was the result of initial reports of serious adverse events associated with Pan's travel sickness tablets, which led to an extensive TGA audit of Pan that found widespread serious deficiencies in the company's manufacturing and quality control procedures, including substitution of ingredients, manipulation of test results and substandard manufacturing processes.2

Occupational toxicity

Australia has always relied heavily on the mining industry for export income, including specific industries with recognised potential health problems through occupational exposure, e.g. lead mining and smelting, and uranium mining with associated processing and usage, i.e. the Anglo-Australian atomic test sites in 1953, near Woomera in South Australia.

Of particular note are the extensive ongoing health issues surrounding asbestos mining, processing/manufacture, usage and waste removal. Poor workplace conditions at the major asbestos mine that operated between 1938-66 in Wittenoom, Western Australia, led to the diagnosis of Australia's first mesothelioma case in 1962. Following the diagnosis of numerous cases in subsequent years, the Australian Mesothelioma Surveillance Program (later the Australian Mesothelioma Register) was established in 1980.

Environmental toxicity

Intensive agricultural practices during the 200 years of European settlement have seen the extensive use of pesticides and herbicides to control insect pests and introduced noxious weeds. Important examples include: the ongoing legacy of contaminated sites from arsenic trioxide cattle dip baths used between 1895 and 1950 to the control cattle tick infestations originating from Java; and more recently, the excessive use of organochlorine insecticides to control the heliothis moth, a devastating and increasingly-resistant cotton pest.

Australia's unique flora and fauna provide an astounding range of natural toxins. Toxic Australian fauna include 17 of the world's 20 most venomous snakes, as well as venomous spiders and marine animals, such as the blue-ringed octopus and various species of fish, jellyfish and cone snails. Of the thousand species of plants in Australia that are toxic to livestock and humans, around 60% are native plants and these commonly result in poisoning of the livestock grazing on native pastures. Algae toxins are also found in freshwater and marine environments, with contaminated drinking water being the most common problem presented by cyanotoxins. Consequently, aspects of clinical toxicology and toxinology have been of particular interest in Australia, including antivenom development and the treatment of acute poisonings.

Toxicology Research

Australian toxicologists are making significant contributions from academia, government and the commercial sector towards assessing the level of risk associated with chemicals and protecting the community from environmental hazards. Most Australian academic and research toxicologists were initially based in small groups within university departments of pharmacology. The growing importance of toxicology in Australia was recognised by the establishment in the mid-1980s of the Key Centre for Applied and Nutritional Toxicology at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Funded by the Australian Research Council's (ARC) Key Centre for Teaching and Research program, it delivered the first general toxicology masters degree program in Australasia, in addition to extensive research activities into detoxication biochemistry, biochemical mechanisms of toxicity, immunotoxicology, toxicokinetics, ecotoxicology and food toxicology. Now located within the RMIT School of Medical Sciences, the toxicology faculty delivers the world's first and only fully-online toxicology postgraduate degrees (i.e. Graduate Diploma in Toxicology and Master of Toxicology), which commenced in 2001.

A second national toxicology research centre was established in 1991 at Queensland University, in partnership with Queensland Health, by the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC). This National Research Centre for Environmental Toxicology (NRCET, now known as EnTox) was specifically established to conduct extensive research activities into human environmental toxicology. Recently, the Australian Centre for Human Health Risk Assessment (ACHHRA) was established at Monash University in 2001, by a consortium of four universities with federal health department support. This centre has expertise in epidemiology, toxicology and environmental sciences and is concerned with risk assessment of human exposure to hazardous chemicals and microorganisms. 3

Most recently, NanoSafe Australia was established in 2006 as a nationwide nanosafety/nanotoxicology research network. It is co-ordinated from RMIT and is providing occupational and environmental health and safety information, research and services to the ARC Nanotechnology Network (ARCNN) and the NHMRC Advisory Committee on Health and Nanotechnology, as well as government, industry and non-government organizations.

Toxicology-related Societies

Toxicology is, by its nature, a multidisciplinary science and Australian toxicologists come from many scientific fields. Many academic and research toxicologists received a pharmacology or biomedical-related education, but the majority of the >1000 persons actively engaged in toxicology-related employment in Australia are employed in government regulatory areas. Consequently there are several cognate professional societies of which Australian toxicologists are active members, including pharmacology, pharmaceutical, pathology, chemistry, environmental, regulatory and forensic societies.

Of particular note is the Australasian Society of Clinical and Experimental Pharmacologists (ASCEP), which established the Toxicology Section as its first subgroup in 1982, then became the Australasian affiliate in the International Union of Toxicology in May 1988, and finally changed its name to include Toxicologists in 1991. Since then, ASCEPT established a lecturer-exchange program with the British Toxicology Society in 1996, and the Clinical Toxicology Section in 2001. Australian toxicologists have also served as directors on the executive committee of IUTOX for 12 continuous years (Priestly BG, Di Marco P, Wright PFA, from 1992-2004) and ASCEPT hosted the first International Congress of Toxicology to be held in the southern hemisphere (ICT-IX, Brisbane July, 2001).

In the ecotoxicology arena, the Australasian Society for Ecotoxicology (ASE) was established in 1994 and simultaneously launched its main publication the "Australasian Journal of Ecotoxicology" (AJE). The most recent significant event in Australian toxicology was the establishment of the Australasian College of Toxicology and Risk Assessment (ACTRA) in July 2006, in order to provide a program of continuing education and establish a registration scheme for practitioners in toxicology and health risk assessment in Australia and New Zealand.

A version of this article was published in Information Resources in Toxicology, 4th Edition, Paul Wright, Copyright Elsevier (2009).


Federal Agencies


State and Territory Governments

Australian Capital Territory
ACT Queensland, QLD
New South Wales, NSW
Northern Territory, NT 		South Australia, SA
Tasmania, TAS
Victoria, VIC
Western Australia, WA


Government Research Organizations


Non-Government Organizations


Universities

Universities Researching and Teaching Toxicology and OHS


Other Universities also teaching Toxicology and OHS


Professional Societies


Poison Control Centers


Databases


Miscellaneous Resources


Key Publications


Legal Links

Federal government legislation (State government legislation not shown)

About Australia


Multilateral Organization Contacts


Literature References from TOXLINE (Australia)

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