Children’s immunity is a health emergency

A recent (12.8.22) ODT reprint of an article from The Conversation noted the dramatic drop, during the Covid19 pandemic, and current low rates, of childhood immunisation against measlesmumpsrubella (MMR), whooping cough, diphtheria, polio, pneumococcal disease and rotavirus, worldwide (‘‘the largest sustained drop in childhood immunisation in a generation’’) and in New Zealand.

Other diseases covered by New Zealand’s child immunisation schedule are hepatitis B, haemophilus influenza type B, chickenpox and HPV.

The World Health Organisation recommends 95% population cover: as at June 30 this year, New Zealand levels at age 6 months were 67.2% (lower for Pasifika, for Maori only 45% and just 32.4% in CountiesManukau), and at age 4.5 years 64.9%.

It’s likely that lockdowns and the pressures that Covid19 has put on family doctors and patients are major causes of the country’s current low childhood immunisation rates.

It’s also possible that antiCovidimmunisation rhetoric from online and other sources (including, sadly, a few doctors, nurses and midwives) has spilled out of the misinformation (lies) basket to infect public understanding of routine childhood immunisations.

And the effect of oncedoctor Andrew Wakefield’s fraudulent ‘‘research’’, which claimed, falsely, to show that the MMR combined vaccine could cause autism and inflammatory bowel disease, and which, decades later, still attracts cultlike belief from some, probably still has an effect.

Whatever the causes of low immunisation levels, the present situation is a public health emergency.

With borders now open, countrywide outbreaks of measles (eliminated from New Zealand) and whooping cough (which surges every 34 years) may, unless immunisation levels are increased urgently, especially for Pasifika and Maori, bring death, brain damage and/or lifelong lung disease to many children.

And polio. A viral disease that paralyses; that can kill; that in preventilator days saw some sufferers treated in ‘‘iron lungs’’; that even after recovery can cause ‘‘postpolio syndrome’’ many years later.

Civis remembers childhood contemporaries whom it condemned to wheelchairs, and parental tales of school closures for weeks during earlier epidemics. And being lined up at school for injections when the first polio vaccine became available in the late 1950s, and, later, for the oral drops that replaced the injection (no worries about informed consent, just gratitude).

Polio was eliminated from most developed nations years ago. But in

July a case was identified in an unvaccinated man in New York state, causing paralysis, and detection of the virus in sewage in two of its counties (immunisation rates of only 58% and 60%) has led the state health commissioner to warn there may be hundreds of undetected cases.

Britain’s last known case of polio was in 1984, but the virus was detected in London in February and has now been found in sewage in eight London boroughs, where immunisation rates are much lower (some only 55%) than the national 84.6%, leading authorities to offer booster immunisation to all children under 10 in Greater London.

Ideally childhood immunisations should be done by the general practices with which families are enrolled. But not all New Zealand residents are enrolled with a practice, and the unenrolled are those least likely to be immunised. And general practices, ground down by years of underfunding, increased administrative demands and Covid19, must by now be at the end of their tether.

Reaching high Covid19 immunisation levels, despite an incompetent (and at times obstructive) health ministry, has shown what can be done by involving hapu, community groups and churches in outreach.

These looming epidemics, threatening children particularly, need similar immediate action.

The ODT Bible reading on 29.8.22 surprised Civis: ‘‘Let love and faithlessness never leave you.’’ (Proverbs 3.3). Really? ‘‘Faithlessness’’?

The King James version has ‘‘truth’’; the Jerusalem ‘‘loyalty’’, the RSV ‘‘loyalty and faithfulness’’, spousal translation of the Hebrew suggested ‘‘steadfastness’’: none were negative. Did use of predictive text subvert an intended ‘‘faithfulness’’? — You are right — Ed