Health experts are warning that measles is becoming a serious threat in Australia as childhood vaccination rates slide, with the country now recording its lowest vaccine coverage for children in a decade. Specialists say they do not want to see a child or an adult die of measles in Australia, as has already happened in the United States.
The decline has been steady rather than sudden. Coverage for children has fallen every year for the past five or six years since COVID, leaving Australia with the weakest protection in ten years. Experts point to rising misinformation and vaccine hesitancy, but they stress that access to vaccination is also part of the problem.
The gaps are not evenly spread. Hotspots of under-vaccination include northern New South Wales, the Noosa Hinterland and the Gold Coast in Queensland, and large parts of Western Australia's southwest, with further pockets in Melbourne and Sydney. These are the areas where a measles outbreak could take hold most easily.
The warning comes against a worsening global backdrop. The United Kingdom is in the throes of another measles outbreak, and the World Health Organization has stripped it of its elimination status, meaning the virus is once again spreading locally there. Experts say the same trend is now emerging in the United States and in Australia.
Measles is far from a mild illness for many children. According to the figures cited, a fifth of children who catch it are hospitalised, one in 20 develop pneumonia, and one in 10 suffer an ear infection that can lead to permanent hearing loss. The disease can also carry a rare danger that surfaces only long after the initial infection.
That danger is illustrated by the case of Renee, a British girl who died in September 2023, just before her 11th birthday. Doctors took months of tests to work out that she was dying from a rare complication of a measles infection she had caught at five months old, when she was too young to be vaccinated. She recovered at the time, but the virus stayed in her body, silently replicating, in a condition that is fatal and usually takes seven to ten years for symptoms to appear.
Her mother, Rebecca, described how Renee gradually weakened, struggled to keep her eyes open, slowly stopped eating, ended up on a breathing tube and was no longer able to talk. Rebecca is now speaking out to raise awareness of the complications of measles, saying she feels angry and sad that some parents do not understand they may be putting their children in a potentially life-threatening situation, and that she is determined other families do not face the same loss.