clinical focus
Calling the shots
The furore over unvaccinated children has overshadowed an alarming nationwide trend. Many adults, particularly the elderly, are missing out on their jabs.
Raina MacIntyre interviewed by Dallas Bastian
Despite media and political noise surrounding vaccinehesitant parents, non-immunised children form a very small proportion of under-vaccinated Australians and a shift of perspective is urgently required.
This is the call from Dr Rob Menzies, senior lecturer at the University of New South Wales’ Vaccine and Infection Research Lab( UNSW VIRL) and lead author of a new report on the subject.
Published last week in The Medical Journal of Australia and titled Vaccine Myopia, the report found just 49 per cent of Australian adults are not receiving the government-funded vaccinations each year for influenza, pneumococcal pneumonia and shingles, compared to 7 per cent of Australian children and 27 per cent of Australian adolescents.
UNSW VIRL head and report co-author professor Raina MacIntyre said poor uptake of adult vaccination comes down to perception and includes not placing older Australians on par with children as a disease-vulnerable group.
“ Vaccination rates are significantly higher among infants versus their grandparents, despite the availability of free vaccines for both groups,” MacIntyre said.“ This demonstrates the lower value that society places on keeping older Australians healthy.”
Aged Care Insite sits down with MacIntyre to find out why we might be seeing these figures and how they can be addressed.
ACI: Just under half of Australian adults are not receiving government-funded vaccinations each year. Does this number increase as we move up through the age groups? What do the figures look like for those aged 65-plus and elderly Australians? RM: Generally, when people reach the age of 65, many do get the recommended vaccines, and certainly the rates of vaccinations are higher than for people under 65. But as you get older, especially after you become older than the age of 80, the vaccination rates tend to drop off again. There seems to be a bit of bias there in terms of not vaccinating older Australians beyond the age of 80.
Why might we be seeing some of these figures? Why aren’ t Australian adults receiving government-funded vaccinations? There are a number of reasons and some of them are to do with the adults themselves. Unlike an infant, adults are a mobile population. They’ re independent. They’ ve got lots of other things going on in their lives and vaccination sometimes gets forgotten. It’ s not high priority. Until now, we haven’ t had any vaccine register for everyone. There has just been a childhood vaccine register, so there hasn’ t been a way of reminding people about their vaccinations, but now we can keep track of vaccination of all adults throughout the whole of life as well.
There are a lot of myths and misconceptions about vaccines. With flu vaccine, for example, there’ s a common myth that people might get the flu after getting the flu vaccine. You hear people saying:“ The flu vaccine gave me the flu.” Well, technically, that’ s not possible because it’ s not a live vaccine. However, there are about 90 different viruses that cause flu-like symptoms during winter, and people can get any of those other infections and might think that they’ ve got the flu when in fact they’ ve got something else. The vaccine will only protect against flu.
Those myths also are a significant barrier to vaccination and there’ s
22 agedcareinsite. com. au