NZ does quite badly on childhood immunisations, even compared to many lower-income countries.
Australia, by comparison, has very high childhood vaccination rates.
94% of children age 5 are protected.
It's only 80% in NZ.
You need 92-94% to achieve herd immunity to measles.
They've protected their vulnerable patients. And their kids.
We, however, will face outbreaks.
109 nations across the world have compulsory childhood vaccinations.
It's a policy choice that reduces unnecessary death and disability across much of South-, Central- and North- America, Europe, Asia, and Africa.
In NZ, 33% of 18-month-olds are not fully vaccinated.
109 countries require children to be# immunised, to prevent death and disability from vaccine preventable diseases like measles, pertussis, polio, and diphtheria.
Not NZ. #nzpol
In fact, in many parts of New Zealand, our rates of childhood coverage are downright abysmal.
As low, or lower than, the childhood vaccination rates of many impoverished nations.
It's not rocket science. We could do better in protecting New Zealanders' public health.
But it seems like we're moving backwards.
Waiting for the next measles or polio outbreak...
inevitable because our vaccination rates are so low.
then closing down schools out of panic.
Measles, mumps, rubella, pertussis, and polio outbreaks are pretty much inevitable when you have vaccination rates as low as ours are in New Zealand.
And if you drill down deeper, you'll see almost unimaginable regional (mostly poverty related) differences in childhood vaccination rates.
Rates as low as 49% in some poor rural areas.
Truly third-world levels of protection...
... compared with Aboriginal Australian childhood (5-yr-olds) vaccination rates of 96%.
We can do better.
TBH, as a wealthy country, it's not likely we could do much worse.
Requiring childhood vaccinations is an option that's used by 109 other countries.
Unvaccinated kids, repeated outbreaks, and school closures is not a healthy response to an ongoing problem.
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@TovaOBrien mentioned 'dominoes falling' in her tongue-in-cheek article today on NZ's occasionally #DoctorlessHospitals.
Funny if it wasn't true:
1) Rawene Hospital 2022 2) Kaitaia Hospital (LPS only) 3) Dargaville Hospital
Upcoming...
Bay of Islands
Note that the canaries in the coal mine are more often poor, Maori, isolated, rural, underserved, and impoverished.
But that the disease of #austerity spreads to the whiter, richer areas eventually.
Rawene in 2022 was the first to go in Northland. Amazing doctors up there. Surreal levels of dedication to their community.
Lost ability to staff doctors on the wards then also on the weekends+overnights.
I did a little session on bluebottle #jellyfish stings today on @RNZ. You can't cover too much in 3 minutes so here's a bit more info.
Physalia utriculus (actually not a jellyfish but an absolutely amazing *colony* of creatures!) 1/
In New Zealand we have bluebottles. Not deadly, but painful.
And for ages we've had more incorrect information than correct information spread about them.
You'll hear things like you should pee on it, you should scrape it off with a credit card, you should wash it off with a hose. Pretty much all the advice is either making things worse, or unhelpful.
National's getting rid of the 2023 Smokefree legislation: it was going to prevent an estimated 8,000 deaths and save 1.3 billion dollars in health costs over 20 years.
The smokefree legislation was going to do three main things: reduce addictive nicotine levels in cigarettes, lower the number of tobacco-selling shops from 6,000 to 600, and...
Prevent a generation of young people (18 or younger) from ever smoking tobacco.
A summary thread from the great Emergency Medicine Australasia issue I finally read on the plane; @EMAJournal#foamed
Thom study in EMA: patients with unstable cervical #fractures can sit (29%), walk (63%), lack midline tenderness (27%), and have delayed presentation (20%).
There is virtually no comparing the harms of tobacco/cigarette smoking and vaping.
Cigarettes are a one-way trip into a world of emphysema, heart disease, stroke and cancer.
I treat these conditions every day.
That we allow corporations to profit off this is repulsive.
At the same time we have a teen vaping explosion.
It's an 'adult only' product but of course that's just fiction.
Youth, especially teenagers (and even younger), are a vast and avid market for one of the fastest growing business sectors in New Zealand: vape sales.
If you spend any time around kids, you will have a stunning exposure to the extent of nicotine addiction in teenagers.
The growth of nicotine vapes marketed to kids (and used by them), is the #BusinessOpportunity of the decade.
So any health system that is predicated upon turning sick people into profits is doomed to failure.
The smart, profits are not in treating people with actual health needs.
Once we accept the basic truth that for-profit health care is about making as much profit as possible, and delivering as little health care as possible, we're getting somewhere.