Saturday’s AFL grand final could act as a springboard for Australia’s biggest measles outbreak in years, health experts have warned, with large numbers of Brisbane Lions supporters expected to travel to Melbourne.
Around 20 active cases of measles have been confirmed in Queensland, with the majority in Cairns, as well as smaller clusters in central Queensland and the Gold Coast.
A single case was detected in Brisbane on Thursday, just days before up to 30,000 Lions fans are tipped to descend on the MCG.
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‘Fleeting contact is enough’
Dr Paul Griffin, director of infectious diseases at Brisbane’s Mater Hospital and a lifelong Lions fan, said measles spreads with alarming ease.
“Fleeting contact, or even being in the same room as someone two hours after they were there, infectious with measles, is enough to get infected,” he said.
While Griffin conceded it was unlikely that a symptomatic case would attend the match, he stressed that undetected infections make the risk real. “For every known case of the disease there are likely to be 16 to 20 unknown cases,” he warned.
Measles, eradicated in Australia in 2014, has returned as vaccination rates declined. More than 120 cases have already been logged in 2025, making this the worst outbreak since 2019.
“This is our biggest (outbreak) since 2019, and with our current trajectory, we could continue to break other records,” Griffin said, calling the resurgence a “terrible tragedy”.
He pointed to falling vaccination coverage, now at just 90.35 per cent in Queensland, and misinformation following the COVID-19 pandemic as key drivers of the problem. With severe complications such as pneumonia, brain swelling and even death possible, Griffin said Australia cannot afford to repeat the worsening situation in the United States.