PREGNANT women in Queensland will become the first in Australia to be given free vaccines for whooping cough.
THE state government is also stirring the ire of the Australian Medical Association by allowing pharmacists to give adults injections for measles and whooping cough.
Queensland Premier Campbell Newman said the government wanted to have 95 per cent of the state’s children and 85 per cent of adolescents immunised against childhood diseases. Immunisation rates are lower in the Sunshine Coast where fewer than 88 per cent of five-year-old children are fully vaccinated. “By getting the herd immunity level up, we protect people who cannot be vaccinated, for example, the elderly or people with immune system problems,” he told reporters. From July 2014, women in their last trimester of pregnancy will be given a free whooping cough vaccine, with Queensland becoming the first state in Australia with such a program, while Victoria continues with trials. “The important thing … is to make sure the you can build the anti-body in the woman and the child so that when it is born, that infant does have some immunity,” Health Minister Lawrence Springborg told reporters. Pharmacists will be able to provide adult vaccines for measles and whopping cough from September. In January, the AMA urged Queensland’s chief health officer to can a trial of pharmacists administering the injections, arguing special training was needed. Mr Newman recalled being infected with whooping cough along with two fellow colleagues at GrainCo during the late 1990s. “It was not fun having a terrible childhood disease in your late thirties and I can tell you now one of my colleagues actually cracked a rib from coughing fits that he had,” he said. “I’d assumed I’d had all my shots for everything under the sun and so it was quite a surprise and shock to get a bug like that.” Mr Springborg urged the public to ignore the anti-vaccination lobby. “The anti-vaccination lobby spreads misinformation – unfortunately we can’t stop them doing that,” he said.