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April 2nd, 2013 
NSW Health wants to lift the rate of child immunisation in the face of an increasing number of parents who are delaying or forgetting the important injections.
Child immunisation rates in NSW are around 91 to 92 per cent.
However, a 95 per cent coverage is needed for effective disease control.
Associate Professor Kristine Macartney, from The National Centre for Immunisation Research and Surveillance, says many children are not immunised because people no longer see the consequences of vaccine preventable diseases.
“In our grandparents’ time they saw polio and they saw people commonly in the street who had been affected by polio,” Dr Macartney told AAP.
“These days we don’t see a lot of people with the severe affects of meningitis or the serious consequences of measles.
“We’ve been our own enemy in the sense that we’ve driven down rates of disease.
“But we need to be able to get out there and tell people how important keeping our immunisation rates high is to keep those diseases at bay.”
Dr Macartney said a good example was last year’s measles outbreak in western and southwestern Sydney where about 200 people, including babies, were affected because they weren’t immunised.
“If we don’t have high immunisation rates then measles will just take off like wildfire in the community,” she said.
“That’s exactly what started to happen last year but it was stopped very quickly.”
NSW Health is launching a Save the Date campaign to remind parents of the importance of immunisation including a smartphone app and website resources.
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