Vaccination Again.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXI, Issue 6, 5 February 1903, Page 18

Vaccination Again.

The Health Department is now straining every effort to not only secure universal adoption of vaccination, but to wipe off the arrears that have accumulated fluring the past few years, and we should not be surprised to see any day a crop of prosecutions. The latest step taken by the Department is the circulation of a lecture by Sir Theodore Dyke Acland at the Mansion House, London, last year. The lecture was entitled ' Vaccination and Common Sense,' and the lecturer had no difficulty at all in proving that the terms were synonymous. In this Colony there is practically no avowed opposition to vaccination. Here and there a ' peculiar ' person objects, but the growing decline of the practice is due more to apathy than to repugnance. In some parts of England the.re is fierce controversy on the subject, and it is little matter for wonder when it is remembered that the lymph comes from many sources, and without effective guarantee of purity. * One can understand ' conscientious ' objections to vaccination, when he reads of the most horrible diseases being spread by impure lymph, and sympathy must go out to the man who, having already lost two children in this way, went to prison, and piactically brought ruin on himself, rather than submit the others to the risk. But in this Colony no such fears need be entertained, because pure lymph is supplied by the Government, and no medical man may use any other under a penalty of £50. Still, the law permits of conscientious objections, and no person can be forced to have a child vaccinated unless he or she is willinp- Under the conditions mentioned every parent ought to be willing if regard bo had to the lives of the children. Smallpox is shown to be a disease of children where vaccination is neglected. It has been proved by recent epidemics that where vaccination is extensively practised

less than 10 per cent, of deaths occurs among, those attacked, while the mortality ranges as high as more than 66 per cent, where the opposite is the case. This experience has -been frequently confirmed, but it alone aWI? en parents to the importance of guarding against a disease which may make its appearance at any moment.