Page 901 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 22 March 2017
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Here in the ACT we should also take satisfaction in having some of the highest immunisation rates in the nation. According to the latest annual report from the commonwealth Department of Health, we have the highest proportion of children fully immunised at age 12 months, the second highest proportion at age 24 months, and the third highest proportion at age 60 months—behind only Victoria and Tasmania—and yet we cannot afford to become complacent. The success of any immunisation program relies upon what medical experts call herd immunity.
In all communities a certain number of individuals cannot be vaccinated, either for medical reasons or because they are too young. In addition, vaccines are never 100 per cent effective and a certain number of those who have been vaccinated will not develop immunity. To keep all of these vulnerable individuals safe and to successfully interrupt disease transmission more broadly, it is necessary for the vaccination rate to be very high, with the goal set at 95 per cent in most instances, a rate that we have come close to in the ACT but have not yet reached.
All of this becomes tremendously important when we realise that, after years of remarkable success in tackling the occurrence of vaccine preventable diseases, many of these diseases have started making comebacks both in Australia and internationally. Only three years ago the World Health Organisation announced that measles elimination had been achieved by Australia; later that same year a surge in the number of measles cases in our nation hit a 16-year high. Measles outbreaks occurred in both Perth and Sydney this past December. Currently a seven-year-old girl is in a Brisbane hospital in a medically induced coma, having been diagnosed with tetanus. In every case, these outbreaks have been linked to insufficient rates of immunisation. We can certainly be grateful that such outbreaks have not occurred in the ACT but we need to be vigilant.
As Dr Michael Gannon, President of the Australian Medical Association, recently noted, about 10 per cent of Australian parents are “so-called vaccine hesitant. They worry about vaccination and they can be swayed very easily by any message which might be seen to question the validity of the science”. It is for this reason that governments must be very clear in their messaging. Any ambiguity, even if unintentional, can easily be misinterpreted.
Consequently, the recent proposal for the states and territories to adopt uniform no jab no play laws has received bipartisan support at the federal level and universal support from the medical community, including the Australian Medical Association. Dr Gannon has gone on record praising the effectiveness of the commonwealth’s no jab no play policy, which increased immunisation rates by three per cent in its first six months of operation. Dr Tony Bartone, vice-president of the association, has described no jab no play as “a bonus or a plus” in this argument.
Much of the effectiveness of such policies comes not with the one to two per cent of the population that Dr Bartone has identified as hardcore opponents of vaccination who are unlikely to change their minds but with the remaining eight to nine per cent who, according to the AMA’s Dr Gannon, are the parents who fail to get their children vaccinated on time, in large part because they lead busy lives. Incentives, in
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