The take-up rate of children's vaccines in the Republic has slipped to 10 per cent behind those in Northern Ireland, an Oireachtas committee was told yesterday.
Dr Darina O'Flanagan, director of the National Disease Surveillance Centre, warned that the decline was putting communities as well as individual children at risk.
She was addressing the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Health and Children, which is inquiring into allegations of a link between immunisation and autism and other safety concerns.
Dr O'Flanagan said outbreaks of measles, such as the one last year which claimed the lives of two children in Dublin, would continue unless the take-up improved for the three-in-one MMR vaccine.
Take-up for the vaccine last year was 80.6 per cent compared with 91 per cent for Northern Ireland. For the HIB vaccine, which safeguards against haemophilus influenzae type B, the take-up was 86.1 per cent in the Republic compared with 96.5 per cent in the North.
Dr O'Flanagan stressed that the benefits of vaccination far outweighed any potential risks. However, she said, consideration should be given to a nofault compensation scheme for children who had a rare, adverse reaction to a vaccine.
Dr Kevin Connolly, a paediatrician at Portiuncula Hospital, Co Galway, said a small number of children - about one in 1,000 - were not suitable for vaccines. These included children with leukaemia, cancer or congenital immune deficiencies.
He noted: "In the same way that no vaccine is 100 per cent effective, no vaccine is 100 per cent safe." However, he said, the only known risks were a very small number of temporary side-effects. All research to date had consistently concluded there was no evidence of an association between the vaccines and autism.
He said it was safer to give multiple vaccines than to administer them separately, given that the single vaccines had been shown to be less effective.
Prof Denis Gill, of Temple Street Children's Hospital, said a carrot-and-stick approach might be needed to encourage parents to immunise their children. In the US, he noted, a "no shot, no school" policy operated in some states, while in France compliance with vaccination schemes was linked to social welfare payments.
