Needless suffering: Dutch pediatricians urge vaccination after whooping cough deaths
Alarmed by a surge in preventable illnesses, Dutch pediatricians are urging parents to vaccinate their children, highlighting unnecessary tragedies like the recent deaths of four babies due to whooping cough. Eight senior leaders in pediatric medicine said there is growing concern that the Netherlands will contend with more cases of serious illness or death from whooping cough, measles outbreaks, and other infections.
"Children's wards are currently seeing a significant increase in suffering as a result of life-threatening infections that are often preventable through vaccination," they wrote. The joint appeal was released in response to news that at least four children died from whooping cough since February. "It is the highest number we have seen in the Netherlands since the introduction of the whooping cough vaccine in the National Vaccination Program in 1957."
"We are really seeing more seriously ill children in our nursing care wards," said Louis Bont, the head of pediatrics at Wilhelmina Children's Hospital at the University Medical Center. He co-signed the letter distributed on Monday. "That suffering can often be prevented through vaccination," he told NPO Radio 1.
The group of medical experts also expressed concern about the recent measles outbreak in the Eindhoven region, especially now that vaccination rates for children under two years of age has fallen below 90 percent. Bont said the rate has fallen even further in some parts of the country, meaning those regions will be more likely to experience their own outbreaks.
The highly contagious disease has also been on the rise elsewhere in Europe in recent years. "The vast majority of life-threatening infections in childhood are preventable through vaccinations. This not only concerns whooping cough and measles, but also serious bacterial infections such as blood poisoning and meningitis."
They said that more children will inevitably become infected and develop symptoms as child vaccination levels fall. One possible issue they identified is that many parents of young children never had to deal with many of the health problems of the past.
"Vaccinations are no longer self-evident. We realize that due to the effectiveness of the vaccines, most parents have never seen the seriousness of infectious childhood diseases," the letter continued. They encouraged anyone with doubts about vaccine use to contact their pediatrician, child development doctor, or their primary care physician to discuss concerns.
The letter was signed jointly by the heads of the Beatrix Children's Hospital UMCG in Groningen and the Emma Children's Hospital Amsterdam UMC, as well as the medical director for the Amalia Children's Hospital Nijmegen, part of the Radboud University Medical Center. The heads of pediatrics from the children's hospitals at UMC Utrecht, Maastricht UMC, Leiden UMC and Erasmus MC also signed the statement, along with Lissy de Ridder, the chair of pediatrics association NVK.
