CLEAN COMMUNITIES
Our country’s normal conversation is about overseas problems politics, jobs, crime, health, population growth and its decline, our indifferent weather patterns, entertainment and all sport, yet when it comes to our environment especially with our own province of Taranaki is somehow avoided, but why. We all know we have our rubbish trucks pick ups but that to me isn’t good enough because we still have people littering our streets, parks, walkways and foot paths, forgetting there’s rubbish bins around also which in turn would help our councils so lets all take ownership of our city, towns and villages and keep them clean. If we can all do this our visitors and tourists will be wanting to return to our provinces, city, towns and villages plus bring their friends with them.
Tom Stephens
New Plymouth.
IMMUNISE CHILDREN
A group of Taranaki people has got together and set up a trust to help improve the percentage of children being immunised.
The Ethyl Gray Charitable Trust of New Zealand is named after a young nurse at Stratford Hospital who contracted polio from a patient and died four days later. This happened at the Stratford Hospital before nurses were able to have the protection of immunisation. One of the trustees nursed with and was a close friend of Ethyl Gray. She carries the trauma to this day of hearing the thump, thump, of that iron lung supporting Ethyl’s life, stopping.
The trust raises funds to support their objective by promoting and selling a book titled We Can Do Any Thing. The stories in this book are written by and about Taranaki polio survivors who contracted the diseases as children in the 1940’s and 50’s. Their stories are mostly about how they had no choice but just to get on with life. Apart from reading about their courage and determination, the book also contains important history of those days and valuable lessons why polio and other equally deadly viruses need to be wiped out of New Zealand.
Illnesses such as polio, diphtheria, whooping cough, measles, mumps and rubella are now all avoidable and the immunisation programmes in NZ are proven to be effective and safe. In NZ about 5% of young families still do not have their children immunised. We all shrug our shoulders and say, ‘‘they’ve got rights’’. Well in reality it is the rights of those children that get ridden rough shod over we should be concerned about. Children with no voice on the matter, left with a risk that could cause them suffering and disability for life. As a polio survivor myself, I have very strong feelings about this and struggle to understand why some parents cannot know how deadly such illnesses can be. Is it because they lack maturity and have not yet learnt to differentiate opinion from fact? If you are an immunisation sceptic, here is a fact to think about, ‘‘more children die from measles each year in the rest of the world than are born in all of NZ’’. If you are sensible but remain worried about the effects of immunisation, then the very least you must do is go to your doctor and ask for advice. After all, that is the person that you will have to turn too if your child becomes ill.
Douglas Hutchinson Secretary and Treasurer of the Ethyl Gray Charitable Trust of NZ
WRITE TO US
We welcome letters to the editor, 250 words or less preferred. Published at the sole discretion of the editor and they may be edited. Include your address and phone number (not for publication). Send to Taranaki Star, 96 Collins St, 4610 or PO Box 428, Hawera or email to star@dailynews.co.nz. Deadline: Fridays 4pm.