BEWARE OF DOCTOR GOOGLE

Locally, websites that try to increase support for the anti-vaccination movement are increasing, writes Rose Burnett, head of the South African Vaccination & Immunisation Centre and the department of virology at the Sefako Makgatho Health Sciences University in Limpopo, in an article in The South African Medical Journal (SAMJ ). Most anti-vaccination websites are American. But locally, they are also being created. Blogs or forums make up 40,3 percent of these sites, articles 55 percent and e-shops 4,5 percent. The writers are mostly laypeople and parents (63,5 percent), or practitioners specialising in complementary or alternative medicine (30,8 percent) or practitioners who only practise allopathic medicine (5,8 percent). Advertising appears on 55,2 percent of these pages, the majority of which can be linked to organisations that stand to gain financially by making vaccinations seems suspicious. The anti-vaxxers claim that inoculation is profit driven, but remember their sponsors are too.

Of the websites sponsored by these organisations, 80 percent claim that vaccinations don’t really work, and 24 percent claim that inoculation is business driven. Up to 92,5 percent claim that they aren’t safe.