The effects of the anti-vaccination movement are starting to show in the statistics.
Several dozen cases of measles have been reported in the region of Mazovia in the past few days. The Polish Ministry of Health assures that it’s not an epidemic, but at the same time warns that the increased number of cases of the infectious disease should be a warning for opponents of vaccination. The Ministry of Health is now preparing vaccination solutions for foreigners.
There are currently a total of 17 cases and suspected carriers of measles in Mazovia. The Health Minister Professor Łukasz Szumowski argues that the high rate of vaccinations among Poles protect us from the risk of an epidemic.
This does not mean, however, that there are no danger, because of the rapidly developing anti-vaccine movements and their activists undermine this form of health protection, which increases the number of parents who will not vaccinate their children.
Dr. Jaroslaw Pinkas, the head of the Polish Center for Disease Control and Prevention, is worried about trend, saying that more and more people don’t vaccinate their children because they think that measles is not a real danger, but that they are wrong.
Poland is one of the few countries in the world with a high vaccination rate of over 95%, but if the percentage of vaccination declines, infectious diseases would spread much faster.
Dr. Iwona Paradowska-Stankiewicz, the national consultant in the field of Epidemiology, says
that Infectious diseases, which once applied only to children, now also apply to unvaccinated young people. She believes that they are spreading very fast and that vaccinations are the only solution to stop the trend.
Professor Włodziemierz Guta from the National Institute of Public Health underlines that people underestimate exactly how contagious measles can be.
“Everybody are scared of ebola, but if we would have a carrier on a plane, we would simply quarantine him and the people sitting two rows in front of him and two rows to the back of him. But a passenger with measles, we would have to check every single passenger on the plane”.
The latest data show that 128 cases of measles infections were recorded in Poland this year, which is 70 cases more than last year. However, it is still a much smaller number in comparison to other countries, such as Romania which has had more than 10,000 cases of measles recorded so far in 2018.