Page 900 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 22 March 2017
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(b) since the introduction of vaccination for children in Australia in 1932, deaths from vaccine-preventable diseases have fallen by 99 percent;
(c) immunisation is critical for the health not only of individual children but of the wider community through the mechanism of “herd immunity”;
(d) recent surges in cases of infectious diseases such as measles and whooping cough, both in Australia and overseas, have been linked to insufficient rates of vaccination; and
(e) the majority of Australian parents expect childcare centres to be safe places for their children and for the community at large; and
(2) calls on the:
(a) ACT Government to embrace uniform “No Jab, No Play” principles, preventing unvaccinated children (without medical exemptions) from enrolling in the Territory’s childcare centres; and
(b) Minister for Health to clearly express the ACT Government’s unqualified support for childhood vaccination as an essential public health measure and publicly endorse uniform “No Jab, No Play” principles.
The role of vaccinations and immunisation programs in significantly reducing the occurrence of many infectious diseases has been a singular triumph. As the commonwealth Department of Health notes, immunisation is the most significant public health intervention in the past 200 years, providing a safe and efficient way to prevent the spread of many diseases that cause hospitalisation, serious ongoing health conditions and sometimes death. Likewise, the Australian Medical Association identified immunisation as the second most important public health measure we have today, closely behind access to clean water.
Vaccination for children was introduced in Australia in 1932 and since that time deaths from vaccine preventable diseases have fallen by 99 per cent, despite a tripling of the Australian population over the same period. As a consequence, a great many Australians—and especially those who have been born here—have never had a childhood friend who died from measles or one who survived the infection but lost her eyesight in the process. Many Australians have never personally met a man crippled by polio. Most of us will never live next to a woman whose baby was born deaf, blind or with heart defects or intellectual disability because she was exposed to the rubella causing Rubivirus in the early weeks of her pregnancy.
This is a good thing. It is a modern miracle, if you think about it. But even though many of us have no memory of what life was like only a few decades ago when diseases such as smallpox, tetanus, whooping cough and diphtheria decimated Australia’s children and left many survivors with lingering and often serious health conditions, we can never afford to forget the story of where we have come from and how we got here. This triumph deserves to be celebrated.
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