More and more Gypsy families opting to protect children with MMR
Get your jab in first: a nurse gets ready to give the MMR vaccine.
By Jilla Burgess-Allen
MEASLES has been in the news a lot lately, with the major outbreak in Swansea where over 1000 cases were reported in total. There have been several other smaller outbreaks, in for example the Wigan area, and in the Gypsy and Traveller community.
I’m a trainee in Public Health and we learn that vaccination saves millions of lives every year, but many parents still feel unsure about whether the MMR vaccine is a good idea. I decided to look into it, and talk to members of the Gypsy Traveller community about how measles and the MMR are viewed these days.
When the Swansea outbreak hit the news it really seemed to get parents who had been against the MMR to rethink their decision. The demand for the MMR during the outbreak was massive with over 60,000 jabs given and huge queues for special drop-in clinics.
Before we had the MMR vaccine, measles was a common illness in the UK with about 100 people dying from it each year. If you look at the opening page of Roald Dahl’s children’s book, the BFG, you’ll see it is dedicated to his daughter Olivia. She died of complications from measles when she was seven.
In Roald Dahl's words: “It really is almost a crime to allow your child to go unimmunised. I know how happy Olivia would be if only she could know that her death had helped to save a good deal of illness and death among other
children”.
Measles is a nasty illness and it is extremely infectious. Siobhan from the Derbyshire Gypsy Liaison Group remembers having it as a child.
“I can remember this awful intense pain in your eyes. You couldn’t bear daylight on your eyes, and it does take you quite a few weeks to get over.”
With her first child she decided against the jab and when he got measles he was very poorly. She told me it frightened her to see him like that, and with her next one she went for the MMR. Another factor was a friend who died young.
“I think it was brought home to me when somebody who I knew had got measles when they were a child, I’m not quite sure how it works measles but I think it does weaken you in some ways, an they put it down to complications from measles that he died as a young man.”
Measles spreads when an infected person breathes, coughs, or sneezes. It’s so infectious you can catch it just by being in a room where a person with measles has been, even after that person has gone. And you can catch measles from an infected person even before they have the rash. It used to be quite common to fetch all the children round when one had chicken-pox, mumps or measles so they’d all get it while they were young.
Measles really is far too dangerous for this. Babies under one year old, teenagers and older people can get particularly sick. In the UK this year, more than 1 in 5 teenagers who got measles were hospitalised with it. The main complications of measles are pneumonia (serious and sometimes life-threatening lung disease), ear infection (which can cause deafness), and swelling of the brain (a rare complication which can cause convulsions and brain damage).
The MMR also protects against mumps and rubella (also known as German measles). These illnesses can be serious too. Mumps is usually a mild illness but in older boys and men it can cause painful swelling of the testicles which in rare cases can lead to fertility problems.
The main problem with rubella is the risk to babies if their mothers get it while pregnant. Pregnant women who catch rubella have a 1 in 5 chance of losing the baby, and some babies will be born with incurable deafness, blindness and heart problems.
Given how serious these illnesses can be, I wanted to know why so many parents have been choosing not to get their children vaccinated. When you start looking on the internet it quickly gets confusing. There are a lot of myths going around. The big one comes from a paper published in the medical journal, The Lancet, back in 1998 which seemed to point to a possible link between the MMR and autism. This research has now been thoroughly discredited and the author, Andrew Wakefield, was found guilty of dishonesty and has been struck off the UK medical register.
Take up of MMR is only now beginning to recover from the effects of that scare. And according to Siobhan a lot of families in the Gypsy community still don’t realise there is no link between MMR and autism or brain damage. Nottinghamshire Health Visitor, Tracy, told me that attitudes are changing. Most of the Gypsy parents she meets are opting for the MMR, along with other childhood vaccines, to give their children the best protection.
On the other hand, I’ve also been hearing about parents who were so worried that - those who could afford it - were prepared to spend hundreds of pounds to give their children the separate vaccines privately instead of getting the MMR for free on the NHS. According to Muzelley, these worries get handed down from mother to daughter. In fact, the MMR is safer than the separate jabs. There are no health benefits from using single vaccines instead of MMR and a number of reasons why they are a bad idea.
The main thing is, single vaccines leave children vulnerable to the diseases for a longer period of time. After the first injection, the child still has no immunity to the other two diseases. Also, using single vaccines in this way is experimental. We don’t know what spacing should be used and we don’t have enough evidence to be sure the single vaccines are safe and work well. It doesn’t really make sense to give children six single injections when they can be better protected by just two doses of MMR.
Some people worry that giving a young child several vaccines at once is a lot for their body to cope with. But a child’s immune system deals with millions of germs every day and this is how our defenses are built up. Vaccines trigger a natural immune response, and the number of disease particles in vaccines is very small compared with the number of germs children come across during a normal day of eating, playing and just being kids! Our immune system is designed to deal with a constant stream of germs on and in our bodies.
Years ago Gypsy women didn’t use health services that much. Even today it can be difficult to keep appointments. But I’ve been hearing that parents these days are much more clued up about protecting their children with vaccination. And people are taking some of these childhood diseases more seriously.
Gone are the days when someone would say, so-and-so’s got measles! Bring all the kids round! Now a case of measles is more likely a ground clearer. Let’s hope that tomorrow’s Gypsy children grow up never having suffered measles, mumps or rubella.
Jilla Burgess-Allen is Specialty Registrar in Public Health in Derbyshire