PM's measles help boost jab

By MICHAEL OTTO

The Prime Minister's memories of having chicken-pox and measles as a child are being used in a drive to encourage parents to immunise their children.

Helen Clark's story is one of 180 being recorded by the University of Auckland's Immunisation Advisory Centre as part of a project called "Piercing Memories; remembering the past to protect the future".

The stories will be used as teaching aids at ante-natal clinics and doctors' offices.

The Prime Minister remembered catching chicken-pox as a six-year-old while she was in hospital with pneumonia.

"I remember the hospitalisation ... I did go in very sick with pneumonia and a collapsed lung and I left with chicken-pox, which I contracted from a small boy in the next bed," she said. She suspected that the rest of her family caught the disease from her.

She also contracted measles when aged about 11. The disease had gone right around her school, she said.

"I had a lot of problems with respiratory diseases when I was a child so anything else that came along probably just made the other problems a bit worse."

The PM said her childhood experiences had made her an enthusiastic supporter of immunisation.

" ... I think today's kids are lucky to have it available when we didn't have it available."

The four-year Ministry of Health-funded project, which is nearing completion, aimed to preserve memories of diseases like diphtheria and polio that have largely disappeared from New Zealand because of immunisation.

The centre's Elaine Ellis-Pegler said it had become obvious to staff that some parents had never heard of such diseases or thought they had been eradicated.

"They were having anxieties about the decision to immunise," she said.

Some of the stories told were especially poignant.

"One woman who had diphtheria as a little girl spoke about people who would cross the road rather than walk past her family's house because of their fear of the disease," she said.

Another woman whose five-year-old sister died from polio some 55 years ago said that the loss affected her family to this day - commenting that her sister "should have been my bridesmaid".

Mrs Ellis-Pegler started by recording stories from very elderly people, some of whom were over 100. These people remembered many epidemics in the course of their lives, she said.

"As the old people died, these memories were dying too."

More recently she recorded stories of younger people whose children suffered from diseases like whooping cough.

"One point about these stories is how many people speak of loss - loss of life, parents, children, brothers and sisters, hope of a normal life and mobility."