A university program which helped Australia's response to major disease outbreak will be disbanded at the end of next year.

The Federal Government has cut funding to the Australian National University's Master of Applied Epidemiology (MAE) program.

Emeritus Professor Robert Douglas was the founder of the program and says it has been responsible for Australia's response to serious epidemic outbreaks in the past.

Every young scientist involved in the program spends two years "immersed in disease surveillance and outbreak investigations" around the country.

Professor Douglas said Australia did not have an equivalent of the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, and so many of its vital functions fell to MAE students.

He says over 20 years, about 160 MAE trainees had played central roles in stemming the spread of about 200 epidemics, including SARS, Hendra virus and the swine flu.

"When there was a SARS outbreak, it was our team of students, led by the teachers from ANU, who were put into the field across Asia to both help identify what was happening and identify mechanisms for terminating exposure," he said.

The MAE was recently rolled into the same funding allocation as the broader Public Health Education and Research Program, which had reached its expected end and was not to be renewed.

Professor Douglas says Australia will soon be ill-equipped to deal with epidemic outbreaks.

Along with fellow academics, he is calling for an alternate source of funding to be found.

He says its loss would "leave Australia vulnerable at a time when increasing population movements, changing climate and other pressures increase the likelihood that we will face new pandemics and the re-emergence of old ones".

- ABC/AAP