The death of an Irish baby from measles highlights a growing complacency in the Western world towards vaccination, writes Sylvia Thompson
Listening to Marie Pop describe how her young daughter, Naomi, died in Temple Street Hospital, Dublin, three years ago following complications of the measles will bring tears to the eyes of any parent.
Just one month away from her measles, mumps and rubella vaccination (now given to 12-month-old babies, the MMR was then given to babies at 15 months old), Naomi contracted measles. Within a week, she got pneumonia and spent almost a year seriously ill in hospital before being discharged. Within weeks, she was re-admitted and put on a ventilator. She died four weeks later of acute pneumonia.
The tragic death of Naomi Pop features in a documentary, Fragile Lives - Immunisation At Risk, which will be shown on BBC World on May 29th and 30th. "We couldn't believe this would happen. We used to hear about the measles but I never thought it could be so bad," says Pop in Fragile Lives.
"What I think now is that Naomi's sickness was the will of God but you can't help thinking what if she had been vaccinated. Then she probably would never have got the measles," Pop tells The Irish Times from her home in Clonsilla, Dublin.
Pop's second daughter, Abigail (three) was born just weeks before Naomi died.
"I'd advise parents to get their children vaccinated. Then, at least they will have done everything they can if their child becomes ill. Otherwise, they will have it in the back of their minds forever," Pop adds.
Discussing the 2000 outbreak of measles in Dublin, Prof Denis Gill, paediatric consultant at Temple Street Hospital, believes it was due to declining numbers of children being vaccinated. Vaccination levels for the MMR had declined to 70 per cent of the target population in some parts of Ireland and for widespread immunity to these diseases, an uptake of 95 per cent is required.
"People have forgotten about the ravages of infectious diseases. They have forgotten about the paralysis of polio... Around the time I was born, 400 children died in Ireland every year from the combined effect of diptheria, whooping cough and the measles," says Prof Gill on Fragile Lives.
"The reason we included Naomi Pop's tragic story was to bring home the message to people in the West that low levels of immunisation is not only a problem for the developing world," Jenny Barraclough, the award-winning English documentary film-maker who made Fragile Lives tells The Irish Times.
"I meet a lot of mothers who are intelligent and want the best for their babies but who live in a 'bubble' thinking these diseases aren't happening these days, thinking I'm not going to have my baby vaccinated and have that nasty poison put into my baby. I do understand the worries there were following the study which linked autism to the MMR but that study has been refuted so completely now," continues Barraclough.
"What these mothers don't realise is how selfish their decisions are and how if their child contracts an infectious disease such as the measles, they can pass it on to a baby who is still too small to be vaccinated."
Citing her own grand-daughter's experience of contracting whooping cough in New Zealand, Barraclough adds, "My daughter's five-week-old baby caught the whooping cough from her cleaning lady's unvaccinated child and she almost couldn't cope with this horrible disease and spent some time in the intensive care unit of a hospital there."
In Fragile Lives, Dr Daniel Tarantola, the director of immunisation at the World Health Organisation, draws a more worrying conclusion from the decline in immunisation levels in Western countries.
"Word that some Western mothers are rejecting vaccination is reaching the developing world and there, people [who are not vaccinated] will pay with their lives, not simply with their sense of comfort," he says.
In Fragile Lives, Barraclough charts the history of immunisation from the eradication of the last cases of smallpox in the world in Bangladesh in 1976, through the WHO/UNICEF drive for global childhood immunisation for infectious diseases to disruptions to vaccination programmes caused by war, cultural prejudice, mis-information or the shortage of and cost of vaccines.
She reminds us that every year, there are still 30 million new cases of measles worldwide and 700,000 deaths (400,000 of which are in sub-saharan Africa) from the disease.
"Immunisation is not something you can do partially. Everyone has to do it or it doesn't work. Only when you see a child who is seriously ill from a disease they caught completely unnecessarily, do you realise what this really means.
"All I can say again and again to these mothers in the West who aren't bringing their children for vaccination is that the reason why they are not seeing these terrible diseases of the past is because of immunisation," says Barraclough.
The abiding message from Fragile Lives is that there is no need for people to die from diseases which are absolutely preventable but that the great strides made by vaccination programmes around the world can be lost at any time. Or, as Barraclough says, "Immunisation is not a luxury we can afford to reject."
Fragile Lives - Immunisation at Risk by documentary film-maker Jenny Barraclough and funded by the Seattle-based children's vaccine programme, Path, will be shown on BBC World on May 29th and 30th. See also www.childrensvaccine.org