 | | | | by Brendan O'Neill |
It's been a good year for vaccines - so far. On Wednesday 3 January, figures published by the UK Department of Health showed that the potentially deadly disease meningitis 'C' had been 'smashed' by the drive to immunise children, with a 90 percent drop in cases in under one-year olds and 15 to 17-year olds. And on Thursday 4 January, in a 'measles outbreak warning', parents were encouraged to ignore unfounded fears about the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine and to get their children immunised.
| But has it been so good for parents? Unfortunately not. Both the meningitis 'C' and measles stories were healthy ripostes to recent health scares; yet they were posed in a similarly dramatic way to the health scares themselves. There is a see-saw of fears about the terrible things that vaccines might do to your child and the terrible things that not getting vaccinated might do to your child. One story says that vaccines can make your child austistic, another that fears of vaccines could cause an outbreak of disease. No wonder parents are confused.
| The UK's chief medical officer balanced the hype of the meningitis 'C' vaccine by warning that 'parents…must not be complacent. The other form of meningococcal disease, Group B, is still common and is a killer'. And the way the safety of the MMR vaccine was talked up implied that, by falling for scares, parents sometimes put their children's lives at risk and could cause a 'measles outbreak'. It seems that no discussion of medicine is complete without berating parents for the things they do/don't do/are afraid to do (delete as appropriate) for their kids.
| | Fears about vaccination play on the understandable anxieties parents already have about their children's health - and the way such fears are spread through the media doesn't help. Just six months ago, one story in a national newspaper carried the headline 'Meningitis jab deaths "cover-up": government is accused after 11 die', raising concerns that the now-celebrated meningitis 'C' vaccine was potentially dangerous. And fears about the MMR vaccine continue to haunt parents, despite a statement from the Medical Research Council in April 2000 that 'there is no link between MMR vaccination and autism or inflammatory bowel disorders based on the evidence that is currently available'. In such a climate, it is not surprising that parents are sometimes ambivalent about vaccinations.
| That vaccines can eradicate diseases, and make something like death by measles a thing of the past, is certainly something to celebrate. But when facts and panics come and go, it is small wonder that parents feel less than confident. The reality is that the minimal risk from vaccination pales in comparison to the risk of illness in the absence of vaccination. This would be clear, if the vaccination panic button wasn't so easy to press.
Brendan O'Neill is coordinating the spiked-conference Panic attack: Interrogating our obsession with risk, on Friday 9 May 2003, at the Royal Institution in London.
Read on:
MMR: immune system as metaphor, by Dr Michael Fitzpatrick
Immune to the evidence, by Dr Michael Fitzpatrick
MMR: injection of fear, by Dr Michael Fitzpatrick
MMR: why government reassurances won't work, by Dr Michael Fitzpatrick
spiked-issue: MMR vaccine
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