Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Small Business) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My grandmother lost her husband and her two young daughters to diphtheria in the same week. One day she was living with her husband, two daughters and two sons, and then she was not. Diphtheria caused more deaths than any other communicable disease back in the early 1900s. My family members were three of 4,073 people who died of diphtheria in the decade from 1926 to 1935. Given that our population was a quarter of its size now, you can imagine what those numbers would be in today's world if the mass vaccination program had not taken place as it did. The number of deaths from diphtheria dropped to 44 in the 10 years from 1956 to 1965, and the disease is almost gone from Australia now. We had one imported case in 2001 and we had one imported case in 2011, which led to two additional cases, and one of those people died.

For people born after me—I was born in 1958—you might not remember life before vaccines; you just will not remember. I do. I remember my three sisters with whooping cough. What I remember is my mother's panic—not the whooping sounds of my sisters but the panic in my mother's eyes every time one of my sisters went into that dreadful coughing. All three had mumps. All three had measles. I do not remember polio and smallpox, because the vaccines were well established by the time I was in my childhood.

I would like to remind people who were born more recently of what life looked like before the vaccination programs that we now take for granted. Whooping cough kills 250,000 children worldwide each year. In Australia, before the whooping cough vaccine, we had deaths of between 1,500 and 3,000 per decade, in a population a quarter of its current size. One in 200 children who get whooping cough die of it. Because of the vaccination programs, we had 18 deaths between 1993 and 2004—still 18 too many—and 16 of them were children younger than 12 months old. Whooping cough affects children more than any other age group. Of those 18 deaths, 16 of them were of babies—families lose their babies. Before the vaccinations, every two to three years every child got measles. Everyone got it—the entire community—and hundreds of people died from it. Prior to vaccination, one of the biggest decades for measles was 1926 to 1935, when, with a population of six million, over 1,000 children died.

This was the world before vaccines. Vaccines have removed that world from us. It now may not be as visible as it was, but that is what life looks like when you start to walk away from this wonderful medical miracle called vaccines.