The manager of the “Victor Babeş” Infectious Diseases Hospital in the capital, Dr. Simin Aysel Florescu, explained to News.ro that more and more children with measles are presenting themselves at the medical unit, gradually reaching the situation before the pandemic, with a very large number of cases. Measles is a disease that can cause severe, even fatal complications. There are parents with anti-vaccination beliefs, or who simply neglect this topic, or they don’t have a family doctor and they don’t want to register with one, the doctor added.
“Unfortunately, the situation before the pandemic is slowly returning. As I think the world remembers, before 2019, an epidemic wave of measles developed throughout Europe, in which it is obvious that Romania was also caught, even with a very large number of cases. It is a disease for which there has been a vaccine for a very long time, and now, after during the pandemic things have practically returned to 0 due to restrictions and not vaccination, now measles cases are reappearing.
In July, we had around 25 cases of children with measles, coming from the same outbreak, unvaccinated children, even from unvaccinated mothers, so things will probably accelerate from this point of view.
What protects us is the vaccine, the measles vaccine is administered from the first year of life, according to the National Immunization Program, there is a vaccine, there is availability, it remains to convince the parents to join this vaccination program”, explained the doctor.
Parents who choose not to vaccinate their children, who neglect this aspect or who do not seek a family doctor. Due to these multiple causes, many children remain unimmunized, and there is a danger that the disease phenomenon will increase when school starts.
“There are multiple reasons, some of them have anti-vaccination beliefs, another part simply neglects this subject, others do not have a family doctor and do not make efforts to find one, so the etiology is, so to speak, multiple in this situation, but it’s a shame because Romania is a country that has had a measles vaccination program since the 70s, with very good efficiency. I, as a doctor or student, had never seen measles until these outbreaks began to appear in the unvaccinated areas of Romania.
For now, it is young children who are exposed, they are several years old, we know that the measles vaccination is included in the triple ROR vaccination that is given around the age of one year. So around this age they are exposed, but obviously if we have unvaccinated children of older ages they will also be at risk, so, on the one hand, we, the doctors, should have better communication from this point of view with the families of these children, on the other hand, the degree of responsibility of the parents should somehow increase, because in the end they are the first interested in the child’s well-being”, explained Dr. Simin Florescu.
Some of the complications from measles can be fatal. The doctor explains the existence of a remote danger, as it is possible for the measles virus to persist in the brain and become active after several years.
“Measles is a disease that has at least 30% complications, of various types, from respiratory, otic, ocular, to severe complications, even encephalitis, or bronchopneumonia, some of which can even be fatal for the child, they can generate unnecessary suffering, which the vaccine prevents with great success.
Let’s not forget that those who get measles are exposed to a long-term complication, years from now, called subacute sclerosing panencephalitis, which is a fatal disease. It appears somewhere around the age of 10-14 in children who have been through measles, not all of them, obviously, but we have no way of knowing, and which has no therapeutic solution, it is due to the persistence of the measles virus in the brain, which activates after years.
All of those things are vaccine-preventable, so I think the balance in terms of these possible risks so to speak in quotes that are minor and without any impact versus the risk of complications through disease and distance, I think you should determine a correct choice in the parents’ option, namely vaccination”, the doctor explained to News.ro.
Dr. Adrian Marinescu, the medical director of the Institute of Infectious Diseases “Matei Balş” in the Capital, for his part, draws attention to this phenomenon, stating that doctors see very serious cases of illness, precisely because of the lack of vaccination.
“Unfortunately, we failed to realize that the only preventive method for many infectious diseases is vaccination. We have reached the point where, in relation to our children, we are reluctant and have much lower vaccination rates than we should. When we talk about pneumococcal vaccination, influenza vaccination, meningococcal vaccination, or hepatitis B vaccination, unfortunately the vaccination rate at the population level is categorically very low, for example for pneumococcal we are talking about 60% only in the case of people who have risk factors, and for the others it is a tiny percentage, while at the population level you should have a much higher percentage, so that it is comfortable, to protect you. Unfortunately, we end up with severe cases in relation to our children, dramatic cases, which we could easily avoid by vaccination. I think it is important to follow the vaccination schedule, to think about vaccines that are not mandatory but that have a very important role in relation to the prevention of infectious diseases that can in some cases lead to severe forms and even death”, he specified the doctor.
Trust in vaccines has declined
In a report called “The State of the World’s Children 2023”, published this year in April by UNICEF, the first dedicated exclusively to routine vaccination, it is shown that confidence in the vaccines administered to children decreased by 10% in Romania during the pandemic, as happened moreover in 52 out of 55 countries analyzed in this report. At the same time, the pandemic interrupted all over the world the vaccination process against various diseases, some of them contagious, such as measles. Some of the factors that led to the interruption of vaccination with the basic scheme are the overburdening of the health systems, the redirection of the doctors who dealt with immunization to the anti covid 19 vaccination, the lack of medical personnel and the isolation measures imposed during the pandemic years. The UNICEF report also shows that between 2019 and 2021, 67 million children did not benefit from vaccines, thus decreasing vaccination coverage in more than 100 countries.
In 2020, according to the WHO and Unicef, 23 million children around the world were not vaccinated with basic vaccines, almost 4 million more than in 2019.
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2023-08-14 07:02:00
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