The family of a severely disabled young woman are calling on parents to be better informed before getting their children vaccinated.

It’s a choice every new parent is faced with, but parents Sharree and Gary Collins say New Zealanders need to be better informed about the potentially life changing decision.

At 20-years-old, their daughter Brittany is wheelchair-bound and brain damaged.

“She’s severely disabled…she’s 24/7 and needs all her needs met, ” mother Sharree told TV ONE’s Sunday.

“She can’t stand, or sit, or hold anything, or do anything like that.  So we meet her needs.”

Sharree says her baby girl was a healthy infant, until suffering an adverse reaction to the whooping cough vaccine.

“We would never counsel anyone not to vaccinate, but we would like people to have the information so that they can make an informed choice basically,” father Gary Collins says.

Sharree says the public are still being told that you don’t get severe reactions from vaccines.

“[You get told about] the swollen site, and the redness, and the child will be irritable for, you know a little while and cry.  But I don’t think they’re being told you can get reactions that are as adverse as Brittany’s.”

A quarter of a million children have been vaccinated in the past year in New Zealand.

By the end of this year it’s hoped 95% of all children will have been jabbed, and therefore be safe from polio, smallpox, measles , mumps and rubella and the like.

But Garry and Sharree feel that cases like Brittany’s have often been publicly ignored.

“The message is almost constantly or consistently pro-vaccination,” says Garry.

“I think many doctors are either misinformed or choose to ignore information that’s out there.”

They suspect there are more children, suffering the same effects as Brittany, that the public are not told about.

“In some ways it’s highly likely that there are reactions that the parents don’t recognise because their GP won’t say anything, or doesn’t recognise it,” says Garry.

“As far as they’re concerned vaccines are safe, so they would attribute the change in their child to something else.  So maybe there are not that many parents out there trying to get their child recognised as vaccine damaged, [because] they simply don’t know it themselves.”

Just like Garry and Sharree, Rhonda and Joe Renata don’t want to ban vaccines, but have a similar story to tell.

They lost their 18-year-old daughter Jasmine almost two years ago after what they suspect was a reaction to cervical cancer vaccine Gardasil.

Mum Rhonda says her daughter was healthy, didn’t smoke, didn’t drink and didn’t do drugs.

But after her first Gardasil injection she complained of tingling and pain in her hands, stomach pains as well as body aches.

A year later, and six months after her third injection, Rhonda had her last conversation with her daughter.

She believes Gardasil was to blame.

“Because that was the only thing she had added to her body, and I was probably the only person that would have known that at the time, you know.  No one else would have thought that.”

The Renatas are calling on doctors to watch for warning signs.

“To be more vigilant in the way they decide to vaccinate, and to really examine the possibilities of what may go wrong,” says Rhonda.

Hillary Butler has researched vaccines for 30 years and claims there is a side to vaccinations the public need to know about.

“I know of nine cases of children with serious side effects on ACC and they will be on ACC for the rest of their lives,” she says.

“Some of them are in wheelchairs, some of them are in special care. Some of them have brain disorders, they still go to school, but require special teachers.  Some of them have immune disorders which require constant medical intervention.”

Butler says parents are not being given what they need to make a fully informed choice.

“My objection to any vaccination campaign that has been held in this country so far is that it only tells one side of the story. It does not give parents the amount of information that they need to make a fully informed choice,” she says.

A Sunday investigation found that ACC has approved hundreds of claims for vaccine damage over the past six years.

The majority of those were for minor ailments, like rashes and swelling. However some were serious.

Sunday found that between June 2005 and June 2011 ACC approved 449 claims for vaccine damage, including four cases of Guillain Barre syndrome, a devastating illness that causes paralysis and 17 cases of anaphylactic shock, a potentially fatal allergic reaction.

However Doctor Nikki Turner, adviser to the Parliamentary Health Committee inquiry into immunisation, says immunisations have had a major impact.

“Vaccination programmes have made a huge difference in infant mortality.  And you can see that very clearly in countries where they have low immunisation coverage, or in communities that choose not to vaccinate, you see much higher mortality rates,” she says.

Turner says the ACC payments don’t necessarily mean there’s scientific proof that vaccines are to blame.

“What it means is there might be a possibility of a link and it is unknown,” she says.

“We have a lot of things in New Zealand that are unknown and if you vaccinate every child in the population, things will happen and we don’t always know the reason.”

Turner also says the case for death by vaccine is unproven.

“In New Zealand we have no recorded deaths from vaccination.”

However the centre for adverse reactions monitoring at Otago University recorded more than 5000 vaccine reactions in the past five years. It also monitors suspected vaccine fatalities.

“You’ll see a lot of reports related to children who have died after vaccinations were given but we are vaccinating pretty well every child in the population.  You’re going to see deaths happening,” says Turner.

“My understanding from the data is none of them have been shown to be caused by the vaccine.”

If there was ever a case for vaccination, it’s Charlotte Cleverly Bisman. At just six months old, she lost all her limbs to meningitis.  At the time, there was no vaccine available.

Her parents Pam and Perry are strong advocates for the vaccination against the disease.

Father Perry says going public about Charlotte’s case was a benefit to the community.

“We kind of became big vaccination supporters once we realised there was one and that it could actually benefit people,” he says.   Perry decided to share his experience with other parents and was sponsored by DHB’s around the country, who paid his expenses.

“Every now and again someone would come up to me and say ‘I was sitting on the fence before I saw you tonight, but now I’m definitely going to go and have my children vaccinated’, and that made it all worthwhile.”

In Charlotte’s case, it seems determination can conquer all.

“I think that if this disease didn’t happen to her that she would be pretty incredible as a fully limbed child,” says Pam.

“Why wouldn’t you want to vaccinate against this disease is beyond me,” she says.

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