http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion ... 6652544703
JANET ALBRECHTSEN
Zealots forget the epidemics
BY:JANET ALBRECHTSEN From: The Australian May 29, 2013 12:00AM
TO get a sense of the irrational, conspiratorial zeal of anti-vaccination activists, consider their claims of "vaccination killings", of the "vaccine sickness industry", of the "persons behind mainstream media who have financial interests in the continuation and expansion of vaccinations", of vaccinations as "the greatest hoax of all times".
Even more grotesquely, they allege those who support vaccinations are responsible for "the killing and maiming of thousands of defenceless little children with their toxic vaccines".
A woman calling herself an "anti-vaccine activist" made these claims in a recent email to me. She said she sought me out as a defender of free speech. She wanted "a balanced open debate on vaccines". Her hysteria gives the lie to that assurance. I responded: "By all means enter the debate in the spirit of free speech. But do not expect that your claims will sit there unchallenged." I then received further propaganda from more anti-vaccine activists.
To understand what is at stake, watch a boy suffocating from whooping cough because mucus prevents him breathing easily. Or children crippled from polio or a boy locked in a contorted grimace, his body rigid with cramp, racked by spasms from tetanus.
I recently watched these images and more on a DVD given to me by an infectious diseases expert. As the SBS documentary Jabbed noted on Sunday, parents such as me are among a lucky generation who have never seen, let alone experienced, the misery, maiming and death from diseases now preventable thanks to modern vaccination programs.
Dr Clem Boughton has seen all of this during his 35 years working in and leading the infectious diseases department at the former Prince Henry Hospital in Sydney. He recalls the horror of a polio epidemic that struck in 1961-62: "Limbs were destroyed, people couldn't breathe, if they could breathe they couldn't swallow, some drowned in their own secretions because the disease crippled their central nervous system."
Boughton and colleagues gathered together ghastly images of what these diseases did to children because they suspected a time would come when parents too young to remember epidemics would need to be reminded of the horror of these diseases. That time has arrived.
It has become dangerously fashionable to refuse vaccines claiming they are full of toxins. More genuinely toxic is an anti-vaccination push based on dishonest claims that endangers the lives of babies too young to be vaccinated, people who may have missed a vaccination and old people vulnerable to disease.
Boughton is frustrated by the quasi-religious fervour of anti-vaccine proponents. There is a trendiness to it, he says, a mentality that "we are so frightfully educated now that we need not put our children through the trauma of vaccinations". "It's a curious attitude," he says. It is more than curious. It is dangerous.
Consider the statistics. Vaccines have eradicated smallpox worldwide - as Boughton says, one of mankind's finest achievements. Boughton wrote recently that there were 4075 deaths from diphtheria in Australia between 1926 and 1935. Following a vaccination program, deaths in Australia from diphtheria fell to zero by 1990. Since then there have been two infections, both imported.
Between 1926 and 1935 there were 2808 deaths of mainly small children and babies from whooping cough. Following a vaccination program, deaths fell to eight between 1986 and 1990.
In 1938 the incidence of poliomyelitis reached 39.1 per 100,000 people. Since 1952, there has been a dramatic fall but epidemics occurred in 1956 and 1961-62. According to the Health Department, the most recent cases of polio in Australia occurred in 2007 in an overseas-born student who acquired the disease in Pakistan.
Boughton offers a warning about how easily killer diseases return when levels of vaccination fall. He points to more than 1000 deaths from diphtheria following the breakup of the Soviet Union when vaccination programs were interrupted.
Our scientific success has bred a dangerous complacency. In Britain, where measles had been virtually eliminated, there is an epidemic because many parents refused to vaccinate their children with the MMR vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella in the late 1990s and early 2000s. There are measles outbreaks in Europe, mumps in the US and a rubella epidemic in Japan.
According to our federal Department of Health, there is a whooping cough epidemic in this country. Last year more than 10,000 children under 15 were reported to have contracted whooping cough. The two deaths were babies too young to be vaccinated. It's not hard to figure out why. In Australia, up to one in five children in some regions are not fully immunised. In the Richmond Valley area of NSW, 17.53 per cent of one-year-olds, 19.69 per cent of two-year-olds and 21.7 per cent of five-year-olds are not fully immunised. There are similarly low immunisation rates in Fremantle, in inner-city Adelaide, in suburban Darwin, on Queensland's Sunshine Coast and the high-income, highly educated eastern suburbs of Sydney.
To claim Family Tax Benefit Part A, the Child Care Benefit and the Child Care Rebate, parents must immunise their children or register as conscientious objectors. As at December last year, more than 32,000 children were not vaccinated because their parents lodged conscientious objections: a rise from 4271 children in 1999.
It is a distortion of language for there is nothing remotely conscientious about this. Recent moves by NSW Labor Opposition Leader John Robertson and federal Liberal Opposition Leader Tony Abbott to empower childcare centres to refuse care to unvaccinated children are a good start, but let's go further. No parent should receive family tax benefits if they refuse to vaccinate their children.
Indeed, let's go further still. We have rules that cover just about every facet of our daily lives, from the minimum distance between a sink and a power outlet to 40kmh speed limits around our schools. Yet modern society is too supine to make a clear moral judgment, to say unapologetically that public health requires that parents vaccinate their children. Well, that time has come too.
