Anti-jab stance puts community in jeopardy

by Adam Creswell, Health Editor | The Australian | 3 February 2010

UPTAKE rates for the combined measles-mumps-rubella vaccine have not dipped in Australia to the same extent as Britain, where a failure to immunise has been blamed for nearly a dozen deaths.

Experts from the National Centre for Immunisation Research and Surveillance say MMR vaccination rates here have remained just above 90 per cent since Andrew Wakefield’s now debunked research was published in 1998.

But of all the diseases against which children are routinely vaccinated, measles is one of the most contagious. One child in an unvaccinated group will infect up to 18 others on average, according to figures from the US Centers for Disease Control. That in turn means that overall immunisation rates in the population need to be high, as much as 94 per cent, to maintain what is called “herd immunity”, the extra protection that occurs when a disease cannot find enough unprotected hosts to infect, preventing outbreaks from taking hold.

In some parts of Australia — such as the Northern Rivers of NSW and Queensland’s Sunshine Coast — MMR uptake is lower, at about 85 per cent, due to higher concentrations of self-styled “conscientious objectors” who dispute the safety of the injections.

Such people saw in Wakefield a respectable medical justification for the fears they had long held.

But NCIRS senior research fellow Julie Leask says the consequence is that such areas have been the epicentres of disease outbreaks last year, such as whooping cough in northern NSW and measles on the Sunshine Coast.

In these areas, the presence of unvaccinated children allowed the infection to spread to others, potentially including babies too young to be vaccinated themselves.

Leask says it is “understandable” that parents desperately seeking an explanation for their child’s autism will suspect vaccines, simply because these are generally given shortly before the age at which autism symptoms first appear.

And she says it was a tragedy that such flawed research could place entire populations of children at risk.

“People think vaccination is just a private decision and they are making it on behalf of their child,” Leask says. “But they are actually making it on behalf of the community — and what they decide will affect the community.”

Source: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/health-science/anti-jab-stance-puts-community-in-jeopardy/story-e6frg8y6-1225826079397