Out of sight, out of mind
The collective memory of the devastation caused by preventable diseases like polio and German measles is fading and that can lead to complacency. Bess Manson reports.
Lying in bed, sore and feverish, Mervyn Dykes wanted to cry. But the seven-year-old was too hot and too dry to produce tears.
Dykes had polio, a crippling and potentially fatal infectious disease.
‘‘My mother was the only one who broke the quarantine to look after me. I told her ‘I don’t want to die’ and I remember her promising me I wouldn’t.’’
Dykes was one of the lucky ones, coming through it relatively unscathed.
He was one of three pupils of Tawhero primary school in Whanganui to get the dreaded disease in the late 1940s. One was paralysed. The other child died.
He remembers a solemn memorial for that lost child at his school, as fresh in his mind today as it was 70 years ago.
New Zealand experienced several polio epidemics between 1916 and 1956.
‘‘People were utterly terrified of polio. In America there was a point where there were armed guards at the edge of towns to stop people coming from outside with children under 16 because it was considered a childhood disease,’’ says Dykes, who wrote about his experience in the book Polio and
In New Zealand, schools, theatres, public swimming pools – anywhere that was a gathering place – closed during outbreaks.
Dykes, now 77, was struck down decades later with post polio syndrome, a common occurrence for a ‘‘passer’’ – polio parlance for someone who recovered from the disease as a child without obvious effects. He walks with the aid of a cane.
Effective polio vaccines were developed in the 1950s. The disease has disappeared from New Zealand and most parts of the world as a result of immunisation. The Western Pacific region was declared polio free in 2000.
But people should remember there is still no cure for polio, says Dykes. The problem is that vaccinations have removed the disease from the memory of subsequent generations.
Anti-vaxxers would do well to remember what effect the disease had on his generation before the vaccine was developed, he says.
Dykes recalls many people in his generation who were paralysed for life from the disease. Many children grew up with braces on their legs and a lifetime of mobility struggles.
‘‘It’s all very well to take a stance for your family on vaccination but they are putting others at risk. They are creating a risk for people outside their circle. It’s not just about your family, it’s about the community in which you live.’’
Brian Robinson was 17 months old when he got polio. It paralysed his leg and at 72 he still struggles to walk.
Polio is still a disease people are getting overseas and it could easily come back into this country, he warns.
The president of Polio New Zealand, Robinson says some countries have become sceptical of the polio vaccine.
Hardline Islamist militants and clerics in Afghanistan, Nigeria and Pakistan, where the disease still exists, have been opposing polio vaccination campaigns because of a myth that it was a conspiracy to sterilise Muslim children.
Incidents of vaccinators being shot and killed have been reported.
‘‘If you don’t vaccinate your children you need to wake up,’’ Robinson says. ‘‘Polio is just a flight away. There could be an epidemic if people are not vaccinated against it here.
‘‘I know people who say their kids are healthy so won’t contract any of these diseases but I say, do you want to end up like me, struggling just to walk?’’
If anti-vaxxers could only understand the devastation an outbreak of a preventable disease had it might make them think again, he says.
‘‘People need to read up on the polio epidemics, where children were isolated from their families for years.
‘‘Talk to someone with an iron lung because that’s what polio can do. One infection, a cold or flu, could kill you.
‘‘Get vaccinated. You’re not only protecting your children, you are also protecting those people with low immune systems who cannot be vaccinated – the most vulnerable in our communities.’’
Christine Pearson was born deaf in one ear after her mother was infected with German measles (rubella) when she was pregnant.
‘‘Lots of people in my situation were born with multiple disabilities. I was always behind at school because back then there were no teacher aids, no extra help in the classroom. We had to learn how to speak and communicate in the real world.’’
People forget that these are the realities a child affected with rubella has to face, she says.
She believes people who do not vaccinate their children are apathetic. ‘‘People think nothing will happen if the don’t vaccinate because rubella has been out of the consciousness for so long.
‘‘They have to re-educate themselves about how bad an outbreak could be.’’
The impact of diseases like polio, rubella and smallpox has started to fade in collective memory, says Dr Nikki Turner, director of the Immunisation Advisory Centre.
‘‘It’s been 17 years since the last case of rubella in this country but people forget how many were brain damaged by [German] measles.
‘‘It starts to fade out of our collective memory.’’
People who doubted the safety of vaccinations tended do their own research and get skewed towards what they believed.
‘‘The internet magnifies fears. If people type in their particular concerns the internet will flood that fear with like-minded material.’’
A lack of trust in healthcare services, in the government and of international authorities needs to be restored to convince those who doubt the science behind vaccines, she says.
‘‘People are scared. There’s a lack of trust in the world in general at the moment.’’
There needed to be better health literacy on the science behind vaccinations.
Polio
Polio is spreading in some overseas countries and could be brought into New Zealand by travellers and immigrants, the Ministry of Health says. It recommends New Zealand children and international travellers continue to be immunised against polio.
All babies in New Zealand can be immunised against polio as part of their free childhood immunisations at 6 weeks, 3 months and 5 months old. Booster doses are given to children when they’re 4 years old. Polio spreads from person to person and can infect a patient’s brain and spinal cord, causing paralysis.
It can be fatal. The iron lung, invented in the 1920s, was often used on polio patients who were unable to breathe after the virus paralysed muscle groups in the chest.
Polio vaccines were developed in the 1950s. Jonas Salk’s inactivated vaccine of 1955 was followed by Albert Sabin’s weakened live virus oral vaccine in 1960. In New Zealand use of the Salk vaccine delayed the reappearance of polio between 1956 and 1961.
After this a mass immunisation campaign using the Sabin oral vaccine achieved high population coverage and eliminated the polio virus from New Zealand. Since 1962, seven cases of polio have been reported in New Zealand, most recently in 1998.
Rubella
German measles, also known as rubella, is a viral infection that causes a red rash on the body. Aside from the rash, people with German measles usually have a fever and swollen lymph nodes.
The infection can spread from person to person through contact with droplets from an infected person’s sneeze or cough.
The unborn baby is most at risk. Rubella is of serious concern if contracted in the early stages of pregnancy, because it is highly likely to cause severe abnormalities in the developing baby, including cataracts, deafness, heart abnormalities, intellectual disability and behavioural problems.
The rubella vaccine, as part of the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine, is the best method of prevention.
New Zealand had suspected rubella outbreaks in 1898-99, another in 1939, and in 1995 there was a rubella epidemic with 1600 confirmed cases.