THE PRESS TUESDAY, JULY 28, 1987. Vaccine under a cloud

Press, 28 July 1987, Page 20

THE PRESS TUESDAY, JULY 28, 1987. Vaccine under a cloud

The Health Department is wise to call a temporary halt to its immunisation programme in Auckland against meningococcal meningitis. The reported sideeffects on some of the children vaccinated with the menomune vaccine had to be investigated and parents have to be reassured. The department has said it needs more time to complete its investigation of the reported side-effects, and proceeding with the campaign before the investigation is complete would aggravate parental concern. About 130,000 children between the ages of three months and 14 years have been vaccinated in the six-week campaign, and the first of the children under the age of two years, who need a booster shot, were due to have those shots from next week. The delay to the booster programme will affect only these children. Family doctors can offer the booster shots if they consider them to be necessary in the meantime. A very small proportion of the children to whom the vaccine was administered — 44 out of 130,000 — were reported to have had adverse reactions. Vomiting, fainting, fever, temporary paralysis, or a lack of coordination were the chief symptoms. The concern of parents in these circumstances is understandable j■ aiid deserved the department’s consideration. Unfortunately, the required attentiveness to parental worry was lacking at first. The department’s initial response, that the adverse reactions might have been the mass response of a small group of impressionable children, was counter-productive. Further inquiries have shown the side-effects to have been reported from a wider area and from a range of ages, and the department’s view properly has changed. It is still quite possible that many of the children were reacting adversely to the

inoculation procedure rather than the vaccine itself; it is also possible that some of the reported effects were not the result of anything to do with the campaign. An immunisation programme can provide a focus for the round of winter illnesses that otherwise would be accepted without much comment. The Health Department’s revised opinion that it was an error not to publicise and try to explain the adverse reactions of the first group of children is probably correct although the wish not to alarm parents unnecessarily was reasonable.

The need for the campaign cannot be denied. In Auckland last year there were 141 cases of meningococcal meningitis and 12 deaths from the disease; in the first five months of this year there have been another three deaths in the South Auckland health district More than two-thirds of the cases were among children under the age of 14. The awkwardness of the present turn of events is that it raises unnecessary doubts about all immunisation programmes and jeopardises one of the most important facets of community health.

Big immunisation programmes for infants against diseases such as whooping cough, diphtheria, poliomyelitis and rubella, have reduced the incidence of these ailments remarkably. The success of the immunisation programme has removed the threat of epidemics among children so effectively that the value of vaccination needs to be reinforced constantly among generations of new parents who have no direct knowledge of the' alternative. It would be a tragedy if rumour and uninformed speculation about the meningitis campaign gains currency because of poor public relations by the Health Department and damages, in turn, the infant immunisation system of health care.