(TYPING CLICKS)
(DING!)
Hey. How are you?
Good. Good. Nice to see you.
'I'd never seen the measles before.
'Of course it wouldn't be something that I would even
consider to be an infectious disease that's...'
that's highly risky.
But having been on the receiving end of
a high-end reaction to it, it was, yeah,
really scary.
When I look back on it, it's, kind of, like I'm just lucky,
because I actually survived it, and some people aren't so lucky.
When he was 2, I made the decision not to vaccination Cameron
for measles, mumps or rubella,
and that was based on research around at the time
about it causing autism,
and I wasn't prepared to take that risk. I thought,
'Actually, no, that's not something I want to expose my children to.'
He was 13, and he was in his first year at high school,
which is a really impressionable year.
I came back from school one day,
and I felt pretty bad and
pretty much curled up on the couch in a ball for a few days,
and we thought it was just the flu going round.
And then he was deteriorating further, and I took him in,
and they put him on the table,
and the doctor began checking him.
And I was really worried at that point.
And I was extremely alarmed when she said,
'We need to get him to hospital,
and you can get him there faster than I can get an ambulance.'
(TENSE MUSIC)
And they were there waiting for us when we arrived.
The next minute, we were in isolation.
And a doctor came in that was well experienced and mature,...
and he identified and diagnosed Cam with the measles.
(MUSIC CONTINUES)
The vaccination for measles is combined with mumps and rubella
and is known as MMR.
Doctor Andrew Wakefield made headlines 20 years ago,
when his research highlighted a link between the MMR vaccine and autism.
Vaccination rates dropped.
The science took probably six or nine months to start coming through,
by which time the damage was done.
We now have excellent science.
We've got more than 20 very large studies
to show that there is no association with MMR and autism,
but the myth has got stuck.
(CONTEMPLATIVE PIANO MUSIC)
(MONITOR BEEPS)
I didn't realise how serious it was
until, like, more and more doctors started coming in.
And then they were all masked up and suited up coming in
and taking heaps of tests.
It was terrifying. It was, like, 'My God. You mean you can't fix it?
'This isn't antibiotics that'll make it go away?'
They talked about brain damage
from the severe state of measles and possibly even death,
which was really scary.
And when they put him on oxygen,
they said that they had serious concerns for him.
(CONTEMPLATIVE MUSIC)
When you see your...
incredibly healthy young man lying there...
not knowing whether he was gonna live or not was just awful.
It was absolutely awful.
And you've got no control —
you're completely in the hands of the doctors.
And everything that they do, your complete trust in them.
So, yeah, it was devastating. (SNIFFLES)
And to think that I was potentially responsible for that too,
there was a lot of guilt around that,
because I hadn't revisited that information. Yeah.
(SOMBRE PIANO MUSIC)
New Zealand starting immunising for measles in 1969,
drastically reducing deaths.
Prior to a vaccination programme,
pretty well every child in the country catches measles.
Now, people go, 'So what? That's not a big deal.
They'll then get immune.'
But for every child that gets measles,
around about one in a thousand, one in 2000 will die.
What we do know historically
is we have adults in the New Zealand community
with brain damage,
with sight problems, with hearing damage
from measles, from mumps, from rubella.
They tend to be invisible —
they live in small communities, they're now in adulthood.
They were in the times before we had vaccination programme.
We don't see them wandering around community regularly any more.
(CONTEMPLATIVE PIANO MUSIC)
It took two years for my immune system to come right,
and it was just months and months of getting sick almost four,
five times a month and
barely being able to make it in, like, two days a week to school.
And, yeah, it was quite hard to fit back into,
you know, social life and everything.
If you're anti vaccine or vaccination,
do a bit more research,
and you might actually find that
it's a lot better to get vaccinated than to
not and go down the trail I went,
because it's not a good time at all.