The return of polio and measles in the industrialised North represents a “very big step backwards” for medicine, a leading paediatrician declared Wednesday as he warned Barbadians to take immunisation against the crippling childhood diseases seriously.
Dr Clyde Cave said he is baffled that adult Barbadians who were immunised as children in the last century’s drive to wipe out the diseases were now opposing the same vaccinations for their children.
“I have families who are much more committed to having their new puppies get all their shots than they are [with] their children,” he said.
Once thought to have been eradicated, the rising numbers of the two communicable diseases in Europe and the United States in the last several months should be seen as a worrying trend for all healthcare providers, said Dr Cave, a former Director of Medical Services at Queen Elizabeth Hospital.
“The specific concern with the communicable diseases that we thought we had eradicated – largely, polio and measles – is because that is dire,” said Dr Cave. “We had polio centres throughout the Caribbean for affected people who were left with deficits and difficulty walking and using their limbs. [There] had to be major assistance programmes, the hospital level of care, the intensive care, the ventilators [for] breathing…we haven’t had to do that in years. In fact, a lot of those polio rehab centres have closed down.
“With the re-emergence of polio, we are going to start seeing a need for those kinds of things. It certainly represents, from a medical perspective, a very big step backwards.”
He also noted that it was peculiar for some adults in the current generation to refuse to vaccinate their children, given that they themselves would have benefitted in a big way from the vaccination push during the last century.
“It is a little bit unusual, to my way of thinking, that when you don’t have a disease because you are immunised, you think that if you stop immunisation you will no longer have that disease. I am not quite sure how that has become a pervasive thought, but it seems to have resulted in a lot of parents, who themselves were vaccinated and who themselves immunised other children, somehow not keeping it as a priority for their younger children,” Dr Cave said.
Polio is a viral illness that attacks the central nervous system. In severe cases, it can lead to paralysis, trouble breathing and sometimes death.
Once a crippling scourge, global vaccination efforts that followed the development of a polio vaccine by the American Jonas Salk and a team of University of Pittsburgh researchers in 1952, led to a 99 per cent reduction in cases worldwide by the late 1990s.
Measles can cripple the immune system for years after infection, leaving people susceptible to other diseases. In rare cases, it can cause inflammation of the brain – encephalitis – which can lead to permanent brain damage.
Dr Cave further stressed that though measles is often thought of as a disease from a bygone era, the effects of the virus can be deadly.
“Measles is a disease that people, particularly children – and that would be unimmunised children – can die [from]. What we are really worried about is how fast measles would spread. It’s notorious [for] being highly contagious,” he said.
The doctor insisted that Barbadians take their immunisations against viruses seriously, particularly given the reported decline in immunisation coverage.
He said: “We were fairly safe five years ago when we had a really high immunisation coverage from measles. We have won awards for having coverages of 95 and greater per cent. The more recent surveys seem to indicate that our coverage has significantly fallen and some of the new cohorts are showing only 80 per cent.
“Now 80 per cent on a test would sound like a high mark, but to actually interrupt the spread of a virus like measles, that’s not sufficient, especially for a tourist economy,” Dr Cave added.
(SB)
