On the table, unconscious and stretched out on a pillow, Joe Mangy looks deceptively peaceful. The koala’s watery, red-rimmed eyes are the only sign of the disease at war with his body.

Tubes snarl out of a mask covering his face as a vet tech listens to his chest with a stethoscope. He is not healing as well as they had hoped.

Eight days earlier, Joe Mangy – who is about two years old – was found wandering in the middle of a suburban road. Dazed and confused, eyes nearly glued shut with mucus, he was rushed here, to the Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary’s hospital.

Enveloped by rainforest on Queensland’s Gold Coast, the park is full of koalas like this.

Outside the clinic, in a “Koala Rehab Centre” faintly perfumed by eucalyptus leaves, is a three-year-old recovering from a hysterectomy. “It saved her life… but she can’t reproduce,” the head vet Michael Pyne says.

Another male koala stares blankly through narrowed slits. His left tear duct is so inflamed his eyeball is barely visible.

This hospital is ground zero of a grim chlamydia epidemic which is killing thousands of koalas and making even more sterile, pushing the national icons to the brink of extinction.

But it’s also at the core of desperate bid to save them with a vaccine – frustrated efforts which, after over a decade, are still tied up in regulation and running out of both time and money.