In Australia, childhood arthritis is now as common as childhood diabetes, but there are very few experts or treatment options around.

Most states have just one or two specialists on juvenile arthritis, while Tasmania and the Northern Territory have none at all.

At least 6,000 Australian children suffer from incurable arthritis, and doctors nationwide are using Arthritis Awareness Week to raise the alarm for the youngest sufferers.

A campaign has been launched around the Twitter hashtag #KidsGetArthritisToo

Paediatric rheumatologist Professor Devinder Singh-Grewal says the important effort is starting on the back foot.

“Childhood arthritis is the childhood counterpart of adult arthritis,” Professor Singh-Grewal told the ABC.

“It's an inflammatory disease which is autoimmune in origin, where we get the immune system actually attacking children's joints.

“In Australia and New Zealand we have about seven-and-a-half full-time paediatric rheumatologists.

“The problem is that based on international best practice and standards, we'd require between 14 and 28 full-time paediatric rheumatologists to do that job properly.

“One of the big issues is that we don't have the capacity to train paediatric rheumatologists in Australia very well.

“There are only two centres in Australia that can train a paediatric rheumatologist and we've got no funding for actually training, so that there's no guaranteed positions for young, smart, bright paediatricians who want to train as paediatric rheumatologists.

“Now, those doctors need to go overseas to do their training by and large and many of them are discouraged and end up entering into other subspecialties which further compounds our problems,” he said.