PhD Thesis - ResearchSpace@Auckland - The University of Auckland

immunisation. Experiences such as these might have deterred parents from having
their children immunised at a doctor’s surgery. The Health Department was placed in
a paradoxical situation. Its policy was to encourage parents to take their children to be
immunised by their own doctor but as they often charged fees for immunisation over
and above the amount (7s.6d.) provided by the Social Security Fund, it discouraged
parents from attending. It meant the Health Department had to continue to run clinics
if it wished to keep up levels of diphtheria resistance in the community, often paying
doctors to run these clinics as it did not have enough of its own staff to cover them.
Utilising GPs to implement immunisation was not, therefore, a particularly successful
policy from its inception because cost deterred parental attendance. Although there
were departmental clinics and Public Health nurses who could give immunisations,
some children inevitably missed out. The cost issue became paramount in the 1960s
and will be considered in a subsequent chapter. 44
Pertussis Vaccine
Pertussis, or more commonly, whooping cough, was and is one of the more important
communicable diseases of childhood and is very serious in infants under 12 months. 45
It is caused by the bordetella pertussis bacteria which affect the respiratory tract and is
characterised by paroxysms of coughing which terminate in the characteristic
‘whoop’. In the United States 265,269 cases were reported in 1934. 46 Despite its
prevalence as a serious childhood disease it has been very much neglected. Certainly
in New Zealand it did not arouse anything like the fear that epidemics of diphtheria
and later polio did in the eyes of the New Zealand public. Nevertheless, large numbers
of children still suffered; in 1920 of the 107 deaths from pertussis, 57 were in children
under one year. 47 It should be emphasised that even though deaths from pertussis
numbered more than diphtheria, like measles it was not notifiable. It is difficult to
draw an accurate social picture of the disease in New Zealand due to lack of evidence;
however, before 1967 epidemics occurred every three years. In 1949, 308 people
44 See Chapter 6, pp.185-89.
45 The term pertussis will be used in this thesis.
46 P. F. Wehrle, F. H. Top Snr, Communicable and Infectious Diseases, St Louis, 9th ed., 1989, p.465.
47 AJHR, 1921-2, H-31, p.12.
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