30 November, 2012 1:47PM AEDT

Expert debunks anti-vaccine myths

Professor Ian Frazer debunks the 'misinformation' that he says has driven immunisation rates down across Australia

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Statistics show that parents are increasingly struggling with whether or not to immunise their children.

Since 1999, the number of Australians choosing not to immunise has risen from 4271 to more than 30,000.

Among those, parents in Lismore, the Bellingen, Byron and Tweed shires are least likely to vaccinate.

Earlier this week, the Australian Academy of Science, with the support of the Australian Medical Association, published a booklet explaining why vaccinations are so important.

The research was not funded by any drug companies.

One of the authors of the booklet was Professor Ian Frazer who spoke to Fiona Poole about the 'misinformation' that he says has driven immunisation rates down.

Some of his key messages were:

On immunising newborns:

"Vaccines that we give early in life are designed to protect against diseases which are really severe if you get them very early in life, diseases like whooping cough which are lethal diseases if you get them under the age of six months. Your immune system is already mature at the time of birth, it continues to mature through life, but it's already there so it can respond and you need two or three shots to be fully protected against diseases like whooping cough so we have to space them out a bit. We aim to get kids fully immunised before they're at risk."

On choosing some vaccines but not others:

"Each of the vaccines works independently, so the protection you get from one doesn't interfere with or, indeed, give any protection against the other diseases. Chicken pox is not a particularly severe disease if you're lucky, but if you're unlucky it can leave scarring and if you're really unlucky it can go on and cause serious long-term complications. What people kind of forget about is that in adult life you get a disease called shingles, and shingles is due to the chicken pox virus... and it's actually one of the nastier serious complications long-term of chicken pox. The decisions being made about what we know about the nature of these viruses and the diseases that they cause, if there's not an indication to vaccinate we don't recommend it, we recommend it for the diseases where there is a proven benefit."

On heavy metals in vaccines:

"There are no vaccines in Australia that are made with mercury these days. It's as simple as that. There are no heavy metals, none at all. Most of the vaccines made in Australia are preservative free now. One or two have preservatives in them, but they are not heavy metals and they are not toxic."

On autism and ADHD:

"The autism story arose from the work of one particular doctor in the UK whose results suggested to him that there might be a connection - unfortunately it's been proven that he fabricated those results. There was never any data that supported that idea. He made the story up and that has been demonstrated beyond any shadow of a doubt. There have been several subsequent studies done specifically to answer the question whether there was any connection between the measles vaccine and autism and each of them showed no connection whatsoever at all."

On herd immunity:

"The problem is you don't know what your child is going to do when they get a bit older. They may decide they might like to travel in Sub-Saharan Africa where these infections are still very common and where, of course, because they've not been vaccinated as a child they'll be very vulnerable. You also assume that everyone around you is going to get their children vaccinated, but there are communities where that is simply not true, where a substantial amount of people don't vaccinate their children and therefore your child is not protected by the herd immunity we find in the major cities. It just takes one person to come into the community with the infection and then the infection will spread through the community.

On the profits of drug companies:

"Obviously vaccine companies are in the business of making vaccines because they can make money out of it, that's perfectly true. But it wasn't very long ago that the vaccine companies turned up to the Pan American Health Association meeting in New York and said that they were going to go out of the vaccine business because they couldn't make any money out of it. They were looking at the return on vaccination and working out that there wasn't a big enough return to justify the expense of making the vaccines, now just imagine the catastrophe if those companies stopped making vaccines. The companies are required to make quality vaccines and that takes them a lot of time and effort. They have to do a lot of testing and that takes money."

The audio from the interview is attached for download.