To Vaccinate or not

EDUCATED parents are more likely to disagree with immunising their children, according to new demographic data from the Australian Childhood Immunisation Register.

This contrasts with the widespread view that parents who are against immunisation are more influenced by conspiracy theories than hard science.

Dr Glenda Lawrence, an epidemiologist from the National Centre for Immunisation Research and Surveillance in Sydney, found that the 3 per cent of parents who were not immunising their children were more highly educated than the general population.

Most were basing their decisions on research, as people with tertiary educations are trained to do, she said.

"They are more likely to seek information and to challenge information," she said.

Her findings come from a telephone survey of a random sample of parents whose children were incompletely immunised.

Parents were asked if they were aware their children's vaccinations were not up-to-date, and if they had a reason for not immunising.

The survey found that 58 per cent of parents surveyed disagreed with or were concerned about immunisation, she said.

"Their primary concerns were related to concerns about side-effects and most vaccines have mild side-effects," she said.

"These are parents who might have seen their child develop a mild fever or drowsiness after one vaccination, so they have stopped immunising."

Based on Australia's yearly birthrate of 250,000, Dr Lawrence estimates that about 7500 children are not immunised each year due to parental concern.

Dr Lawrence said that childhood diseases had much more serious complications than the mild ones generally associated with vaccines.

"It's a perception of risk versus benefit,"she said.

"Because of a lack of knowledge about the disease, they focus more of the side-effects of the vaccine."

The fact that many based their decision on research made it harder for doctors to convince them of the benefits of immunisation, Dr Lawrence said. "Anecdotally, a lot of GPs will tell you that the patients who bring in information from the internet are usually the more highly educated ones," she said.

However, Dr Lawrence pointed out that a lot of medical research published on the internet was "not peer-reviewed data" but more like a hypothesis unproven by clinical trials. But tertiary-educated Gold Coast mother Narelle Chenery used the skills she gained through studying for a Bachelor of Applied Science (Information Management) to reach her decision not to vaccinate her children.

"I didn't get one single shot," she says of her three children aged four, six and eight.

She first came across the case against vaccination while visiting a birthing centre in Melbourne when expecting her first child.

"I saw a health sheet that had a graph showing that the incidence of a lot of these deadly disease was 90 per cent in decline before (mass) vaccinations were ever instigated and I thought that was very interesting," she said.After that, she bought dozens of books and read widely on the topic.

"Basically, I decided that the risks far outweigh the benefits," she said.

She now believes that bringing up children on a healthy diet is the best way to boost their immune systems.

"They have had the measles and the chickenpox, but it was very mild and they got over it quickly," she said.

"These childhood diseases are meant to be caught in childhood as a primer for the immune system for life."

She says it was this view rather than fear of the side-effects that guided her decision.

"It wasn't a fear-based decision; it was a knowledge-based one."

By Louise Pemble
theaustralian.com.au
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