From Parliament: Routine vaccinations remain important - Shane Reti

Polio caused major health issues in the mid 20th Century, and has been detected in western countries again. Here Health Department clerks manage parental consent cards for the 36,000 children to be vaccinated against polio in 1957.

Covid remains the most well-known virus disruptor of the 21st century to date – but other viruses have recently reactivated that also cause concern.

Many will remember seeing the headlines in 2019 when a terrifying measles outbreak occurred across the country. Families with young children who were not yet fully immunised were too scared to send their young ones to daycare, just in case they caught the lethal illness. These preventable diseases are still very much around and constantly reminding us of the threat that they hold, especially for remindour young children.

One disease that is beginning to rear its ugly head again after half a century is polio. Those of a certain age will remember childhood friends with a limp polio arm or leg because of the virus destroying motor nerves.

Polio is generally spread from sanitation to the mouth. It was one of the success stories for widespread vaccination, initially with an oral vaccine on the tongue, and nowadays with a simple arm injection.

At the beginning of 2022, polio splashed headlines again after the disease was detected in the wastewater in London and Israel, and then later in New York, leading to the declaration of a state of emergency.

The last case of polio in New Zealand was in 1977, but with the recent international recurrence, I was interested in whether New Zealand was testing for polio in our wastewater. I asked Health Minister Andrew Little last year about this and received a surprising response.

Minister Little said that there was capacity to test for polio in New Zealand’s wastewater, but the last time it was tested was back in April 2003. He also said that officials were monitoring international developments and will commence testing when it is indicated.

Further questions needed to be asked, so I wanted to know the number of children under the age of 1 who did not receive their primary polio protection vaccines at six weeks, three months, and five months.

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Counties Manukau, Waikato, Waitemata are all regions that have an unvaccinated rate above 10 per cent. These are followed in close order by Bay of Plenty, Northland, Auckland and Canterbury.

It seemed somewhat by chance that someone thought to test the London wastewater for a virus thought to be long gone. It is not clear to me why we do not at least do a baseline polio wastewater test here in New Zealand to reassure ourselves – especially when we have the ability to do so and an increasing number of young children not protected.

The wider picture talks to the importance of immunisation, especially childhood immunisation given in this context that polio is predominantly a disorder of the under 5s.

I will leave the last words to authors writing in the prestigious Lancet medical who wrote “Poliovirus transmission in London reminds us that no country is safe from polio until eradication is achieved globally. Similar events in 2022 in Israel and the USA, where the first paralytic polio cases since 1989 and 2013 respectively have been reported, act as further reminders and have generated broad public interest.”

Here in New Zealand let’s turn that public interest into public actions.