It started with a headache. But within days Peta Teys was in a hospital emergency room, her pulse racing at 200 beats a minute, vomiting and in pain.
Only days earlier the swimwear maker and designer had celebrated her 18th birthday, feeling a little under the weather after returning from a trip to Bali.
A local GP and hospital failed to realise that she had contracted measles while there.
She was in hospital for more than a week, including periods kept in isolation, but it was not to end there.
”I woke up a few days later and I just couldn’t see anything,” she said. ”It was really scary.”
Ms Teys had also become dangerously iron deficient, and doctors recommended a blood transfusion. ”I felt so tired for months afterwards, and half my hair fell out.”
She said she had never considered that she might catch measles.
”It’s just not something you think is going to happen to you, especially not at my age.”
She is not alone. Health authorities are so concerned about a string of measles outbreaks linked to overseas travel that, as of Thursday, they will begin offering free vaccines against the disease in NSW high schools with low vaccination rates.
They fear many of today’s high school students are suffering the delayed effects of a debunked scare campaign in the 1990s linking the measles, mumps and r (MMR) vaccine to autism, while others simply were never vaccinated because they were born overseas or their parents did not organise it.
NSW Health director of communicable diseases Vicky Sheppeard said up to 40 per cent of high school students in NSW could be missing one or both doses of their measles vaccine.
”In the 1990s there was this myth about the measles vaccine and autism, and many parents who were worried about it selectively chose not to use the measles vaccine,” she said, adding that in 1994 the age the vaccine had been given had also changed, which could have led to people falling through the cracks.
In 2012 a resident of NSW caught measles while travelling in Thailand, and when they returned nearly 170 other became infected. Bali and Vietnam also have high rates of the highly infectious virus, which causes fever, cough and rashes. One in 15 children who catch it will develop pneumonia, and one in 1000 will get an inflammation of the brain that can lead to permanent brain damage or death.
On Thursday vaccines will be offered at Matraville Sports High School. Next term other schools will include Georges River Senior at Oatley, South Sydney High School and Kogarah High School, although parents can also get the vaccine free from their local GP if they are concerned.