It falls into the same category as polio, diphtheria, cholera, tuberculosis, small pox and a legion of other poxes and plagues that just don't touch most of us in a significant way anymore.

This is borne out by the fact that while rubella was only officially declared "eradicated in Australia" earlier this week, it has effectively been off the books for almost a decade. Just eight cases were reported this year, down from 10 in 2017. Most, if not all, are believed to have involved people exposed while travelling abroad.

None of this should blind us to the fact the local eradication is a major public health triumph and a timely reminder of the important role vaccination programs and community education play in changing whole societies for the better.

We should also be mindful that while chances of catching the disease, which is strongly linked to congenital deafness, blindness, debilitating and often deadly cardiac anomalies, intellectual disabilities and miscarriages, are now almost zero, thousands, if not tens of thousands, of Australians are still living with its consequences.

An unimmunised expectant mother who contracts the rubella virus stands an 85 per cent chance of losing their baby or delivering a child who suffers from one or more of these serious side-effects.

The first vaccine was not rolled out here until 1971 when it began to be administered to school girls nationwide.

About one in every 1000 children (roughly 250 a year) born at the time was affected by CRS. 73 per cent of these suffered deafness, 40 per cent suffered eye defects, 26 per cent suffered congenital heart defects and 40 per cent suffered intellectual disability, microcephaly and cerebral palsy.

Many, whose only mistake had been that their mothers had been exposed to the virus while they were pregnant, scored a quinella, trifecta, quadrella, or even a full-house of all these conditions.

And these were the survivors. Almost one in five of pregnancies affected by CRS ended in the death of the child, either through stillbirth (nine per cent); neonatal death (5.6 per cent) or post-neonatal death (2.2 per cent).

There would still be many women in the ACT and elsewhere who are grieving for a baby who was lost to what we now consider to be an inconsequential and easily preventable disease.

This week's announcement needs to be celebrated in conjunction with another recent piece of very good public health news. That is that as a result of the introduction of Australia's world leading papillamavirus vaccination program a decade ago, cervical cancer is expected to become a rare disease here by 2020 and eliminated by 2028.

Vaccination works. It has eradicated the vast majority of the childhood diseases that shattered lives and devastated families only one and two generations ago.

And, thanks to initiatives such as the "no jab, no pay" and "no jab, no play" policies, immunisation rates are touching 95 per cent nationally. This is the figure necessary for what epidemiologists call "herd immunity".

The one thing we can't afford is complacency however. It would take only a slight drop off in vaccinations for one or more of these scourges to renew its deadly grip.