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A child's right to good health |
 A Cambodian baby receives her immunisation against polio.
In the developing countries of the world, national immunisation days are a cause for celebration. Entire communities become involved in these colourful festival days where towns and villages are decked out in streamers and posters.
The head of Unicef Australia (The United Nations Children's Fund), Gaye Phillips, says the contrast between what happens in these countries and what happens in developed countries, Australia in particular, is enormous. Here the government has to give incentives to get people to immunise their children.
In Vietnam recently, everyone from local communist party leaders right up to the prime minister was part of the immunisation push. The prime minister himself was shown immunising a child as part of the campaign. In the developing world, Ms Phillips said, immunisation was not a problematic health issue, it was accepted as mainstream.
"Immunisation is seen as such a positive benefit to the community that the national immunisation days are enormously popular, whereas in Australia, there is resistance," she said.
"We don't see any visible signs to a large scale of the impact of these diseases. Cases are isolated and we see sporadic examples. For some reason some parents seem to think: 'my child won't be affected', that it is more healthy or even loved than other children. They say: 'I'm compensating on a range of other levels, I don't need to immunise.'"
In the developing world, parents see the devastating effects of childhood diseases all around them. One of the reasons they continue to have large families is because child survival rates are low, according to Ms Phillips.
"They lose many of their children before they reach five years of age. Where there is good health care and the child mortality rate drops, so too does the size of the family."
Immunisation is an issue that is tied up with their whole social and economic fabric and the family's status in the community. "It has an enormous impact for people to have healthy surviving children. They don't see the short term pain and minor reactions as a problem."
The World Health Organisation is on schedule to eradicate polio from the world by the year 2000. Other diseases could follow, Ms Phillips says, if immunisation targets are met. But is there a danger that as these diseases become less prevalent, developing countries will become more complacent about immunising their children, as has already happened in Australia?
Ms Phillips hopes not - "but children leap into the future more often than they hold on to the past" and it could happen that the collective memory forgets the social impact and death toll of preventable childhood diseases. She said the next stage of immunisation in both developing and developed countries had to be about educating the community, GPs, and people working in community health and child care centres. There needed to be ongoing community awareness of the scourge of these diseases, with preventive health the cornerstone of the community's health.
The involvement of elderly people in the community played an important role too, Ms Phillips said. Where communities marginalised older people, the experiences and knowledge accrued over a long lifetime did not get passed on. She said we tended to look upon their stories as quaint, but not really relevant to our lives.
"We can learn some wonderful lessons from Aboriginal communities where there is a strong cohesive community. Elder people are looked up to, respected and considered a fount of wisdom and knowledge - this is how the stories are passed down."
A passionate advocate for every child's right to good health, Ms Phillips says we should look at the bigger picture, where the individual is responsible to everyone's child.
"We must maintain the global integrity of children or lose the integrity of the individual. People with children can certainly understand that, once their children start to grow. In the first few months new parents are obsessed about their creation. There is no point in going to a new mum about the collective rights of the child. They don't get that understanding until the child teaches them to separate."
Immunisation is not just related to an injection, it is more a societal thing, Ms Phillips believes. In the long term, she says, educating parents about the dangers of these preventable diseases is the only solution to maintaining high immunisation rates in developing countries and in reversing the decline in countries like Australia.
This article was published in local media in July 1997.
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