Measles – a self-inflicted epidemic
If you had asked me last week whether I had been vaccinated against measles I would have said yes, because I can remember lining up with a lot of children at primary school to get some sort of jab.
My memory is of a device with a circle of small needles which left a ring of pricks on the upper arm.
With a bit of reading, I realise New Zealand did not offer a measles vaccine until 1969.
Before then almost everyone caught the disease as a child and developed an immunity.
So I must have had measles. I can’t remember but I was one of those children who got everything.
The vaccine I got at school must have been against diphtheria, polio or pertussis and I doubt a single parent questioned the wisdom of the preventive action.
Measles is resurgent in New Zealand and around the world.
This week, updated figures showed New Zealand has so far this year recorded 849 cases, making it the country’s worst measles epidemic in at least 22 years.
The South Island has had a few cases but Auckland has posted 731 confirmed cases, with 527 in the Counties Manukau District Health Board area.
The disease has put babies in intensive care and Middlemore Hospital has set up a special ward for sufferers needing hospital care.
The disruption caused by measles can be severe.
Quarantined students are missing school and parents have to take time off work. Unvaccinated
children cannot play sport, attend social or school events, or have non-immune visitors. Every time a person is found with measles at a school, all associated unvaccinated students and staff members must be quarantined.
About 300 Manurewa High School students were sent home this week after 13 students contracted measles.
To put the New Zealand numbers in perspective, let’s look at the United States, where more cases of measles were confirmed in the first five months of this year than in the whole period between 2000 and 2010.
The total US numbers show just how serious New Zealand’s epidemic is. From January 1 to August 22 this year, the US had
1215 individual cases of measles in
30 states.
The US has a population about
68 times that of New Zealand but so far this year has had only about 400 more cases than this country.
The measles outbreak has occurred on a very different scale in both countries for the same
reason – lower vaccination rates.
Nine out of 10 people who caught measles in New Zealand this year had not been vaccinated or didn’t know their vaccination status.
But why the declining vaccination rates? In New Zealand some people obviously struggle to get to the doctor to get their children vaccinated for a variety of practical reasons.
Others have a strong aversion to vaccination because of perceived dangers. In Christchurch, for instance, some parents converge on a particular surgery in Opawa because they get less of a hard time.
A recent article in The Atlantic by Peter Beinart suggests the recurrence of measles in the US (where it was declared gone in 2000) reveals something about its society’s mindset or ‘‘psychic or civic condition’’. He first points to a lack of historical memory, saying people have forgotten what it is like to live with measles or the ravages of other diseases that vaccinations protect against. He draws a parallel with the lack of memory about tariff wars and the impact they can have on the world economy.
I don’t feel that old but I can remember at least one boy with leg braces at my poor Catholic primary school in the early 1960s. He had contracted polio. Iron lungs, which helped polio patients with paralysed diaphragms to breathe, were another horror we all knew about.
Beinart then argues that lower vaccination rates are symptomatic of an ‘‘over-confidence in amateur knowledge’’.
‘‘... it is one thing to Google a food to see whether it is healthy.
‘‘It is quite another to dismiss decades of studies on the benefits of vaccines because you have watched a couple of YouTube videos,’’ he writes.
The next factor central to reduced vaccination is a ‘‘diminished trust in government’’, he says. We all feel this to a certain extent. The danger created by the propaganda, cynicism and doubledealing demonstrated by governments and corporates over the past 50 years is not that we believe anything but that we believe nothing.
Where does this leave us? Clearly the wider societal attitudes, turbocharged by the internet, have as much effect in New Zealand as the United States.
The measles epidemic shows once again that a large section of our community cannot be relied on to ensure their children’s health and safety.
Vaccination is one issue but, as has been highlighted again recently, some parents can’t or don’t supply their children with sustenance at school or preschool or refrain from smoking in cars when driving with children.
Clearly more can be done to ensure the strugglers and those who can’t be bothered are provided with every opportunity to have their children vaccinated.
Cultural identity and responsiveness get a lot of attention but health and survival, not only of individuals but the collective, surely deserve higher priority.
As for the amateur researchers who decide not to vaccinate their children, sometimes the herd must lay down the law. It might be time for compulsory vaccination.
People have forgotten what it is like to live with measles or the ravages of other diseases.