Transcript: Dr Hambleton, ABC 774, Melbourne

Immunisation

RED SYMONS:          I think nine out of 10 of us clearly believe that it is a good thing to immunise children.  Let me put it another way.  One in 10 Australian children are not immunised.  But interestingly, the Federal Government is talking about withholding tax benefits for families who refuse to vaccinate their children.  That kind of seems unusual to me.  Dr Steve Hambleton is the Federal President of the AMA, good morning, doctor.

DR STEVE HAMBLETON:    Good morning.

RED SYMONS:          I don't know how we're going to have this conversation, because we're just going to furiously agree with one another...

DR STEVE HAMBLETON:    There's a good chance of that, because I guess we do agree that immunisation is good for children...

RED SYMONS:          Yes.

DR STEVE HAMBLETON:    ...it is good for keeping away some of these nasty diseases, and thankfully a lot of us don't even remember what it's like to see a child sick with measles or hear a child cough with whooping cough.  Having said that, there's a fair bit of whooping cough around right now, but not in the infants, where it does a lot of damage.

RED SYMONS:          And even I'm too old enough to - I'm not old enough to remember polio terribly well, but that was a big thing too, wasn't it, in the 50s?

DR STEVE HAMBLETON:    It certainly was, and we had whole hospitals set aside for the iron lung, if people remember that, to help people breathe when the polio robbed them of their ability to use their muscles, and so we certainly support incentives for parents to make sure their kids are fully immunised.

RED SYMONS:          But of course, nowadays we realise that immunising children causes autism.

DR STEVE HAMBLETON:    Well it's interesting, we saw that published in one of the international journals, and that's probably the finding that's the most discredited of all.

RED SYMONS:          That's right...

DR STEVE HAMBLETON:    The journals rejected it, the doctor's been struck off, all of his friends who signed up to the article have crossed their signatures off.

RED SYMONS:          And I think he eventually said yeah, I just made it up?  He did, didn't he?

DR STEVE HAMBLETON:    Well, as much as said that in fact, and it's very disappointing, because we see measles flaring up all over the world because of that one single report, which did a lot of damage to the immunisation program.

RED SYMONS:          When you say all over the world, I would have thought it would have been the United States of America, more than anywhere else.  Michele Bachmann, the Republican candidate, recently endorsed that very same idea, and I'm thinking, we all know this is rubbish, why is this still floating around?

DR STEVE HAMBLETON:    Well these myths do seem to get a life of their own, which is very disappointing, and people seize on small pieces of information, and you've got to look at all the evidence, and I think that's the important issue.

RED SYMONS:          I guess we're dealing with the competing fears of parents, nowadays, as you say, we've forgotten that these seemingly trivial diseases, like measles and scarlet fever, whatever, are actually - they can be very bad, and it's through immunisation really, that we've gotten on top of them.

DR STEVE HAMBLETON:    Well it certainly is, and if you look at the figures and the graphs, they're really dramatic, when the immunisation program started, there's a huge drop-off in the incidents of these diseases, tetanus, for example, is another one that we don't see, and I guess diphtheria, we had that in Australia for the first time for a long time, I think last year a young woman, it was very unusual, we had deaths, they were the major causes of death in children, you know, I guess as Australia was a developing nation.

RED SYMONS:          I wonder is it hard for GPs, because if they've never seen these diseases, does it make it more difficult to diagnose them?

DR STEVE HAMBLETON:    Well it certainly does, and measles, for example, not too many of the younger GPs below the age of about 40, 45, would have seen a case of measles...

RED SYMONS:          Yeah, yeah.

DR STEVE HAMBLETON:    ...and yet that would have filled your waiting room a few years ago.  Measles is a particularly nasty illness, and often my staff will call me and say, someone's come in with the measles, and I say, is the child hanging limply in their parents' arms?  No.  Well they probably haven't got measles.  Thirty per cent of measles cases end up with an infectious disease on top, like pneumonia, or...

RED SYMONS:          Oh, okay.

DR STEVE HAMBLETON:    ...even encephalitis, I mean a child with measles is very, very sick, and the average number of people they infect, is another 20, so that's a very, very infectious disease, when we think about the flu as being infectious, the flu on average infects another two, so measles will give you some idea, in an unimmunised environment it really spreads quickly.

RED SYMONS:          Just by the by, if - I'm fairly sure I was immunised against a whole range of things when I was a child, is there any need for me to be reimmunised, as an older person?

DR STEVE HAMBLETON:    Well yes, there is, about every 10 years it's good practice to update your diphtheria and tetanus vaccination, and these days, you can get a triple antigen for adults, and I know that's not the right term, but you can get whooping cough, and diphtheria and tetanus, all in the one injection, and that's pretty good, because we want to make sure we protect our children below the age of one, and they get immunised against whooping cough, but it doesn't start till they're six weeks of age, and if we've got a population that's immune to it, it's not           going to be circulating as much, and therefore the risk to the child is much less.

RED SYMONS:          I've got to be honest, I was more worried about me than the children, but there you go. 

Well let's hope that the Federal Government's initiative to withhold tax benefits, most unusual it would seem to me, will have the effect that we want.  Thank you, doctor.

DR STEVE HAMBLETON:    Thank you very much.

25 November 2011

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