The country’s latest outbreak of measles is still far from being under control, the country’s director of health Graça Freitas has explained.
Talking on breakfast television this morning, Freitas confirmed that there have been over 40 cases of measles confirmed, while 117 are listed as ‘suspected’.
What is confusing in this outbreak is that it has affected “primarily adults, and almost all of them working within the health system” (click here).
Whether this means the victims were all unvaccinated has not been fully clarified.
What Freitas did stress was that measles spreads according to how people who contract it have been vaccinated.
In other words, a non-vaccinated person with measles is likely to get the disease in a “more serious” way, and transmit it to a wider range of third parties. A partially-vaccinated person (someone who may only have received one of the doses of the VASPR triple vaccine) will get the disease in a moderated way, and transmit it accordingly, while a fully-vaccinated person will get the disease “very lightly”, with “almost no transmission”.
Another anomaly in the picture is the fact that until 1990, the triple vaccine was only offered as a single dose protection against measles (mumps and Rubella).
After that date, it became a two-dose vaccine, administered first at the age of 18 months (now 12 months) and second at the age of around 5.
Thus the country is seeing renewed calls to people of all ages to get themselves vaccinated so that the outbreak can be stopped before it cuts any further kind of a swathe.
There have also been calls to insist that all health service workers are vaccinated, but these have been played down by the Nurses’ Association on the basis that the government’s vaccination programme is not mandatory, so it should not be a prerequisite for anyone applying for a job in the health sector.
The association’s spokesperson Ana Rita Cavaco turned the issue into a political football suggesting that “the discussion should centre on the disinvestment in the country in primary health care” rather than in “finding guilty parties”.
natasha.donn@algarveresident.com
