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SPIN CITY: THE MARKETING OF A VACCINE CAMPAIGN 

Around a million New Zealanders, many of them children, are being targeted in what some are calling a public scare campaign - TV commercials, schools and daycares enlisted to terrify parents into authorising the meningitis jab for their kids. But, as BARBARA SUMNER-BURSTYN writes, are we being played for suckers?

For the past 13 years an uncontrolled epidemic has raged in New Zealand, maiming or killing hundreds of New Zealanders, mainly the young.’ So began one of many recent New Zealand Herald exposés on meningococcal disease. Detailing the horrific effects of meningitis being suffered by two Auckland babies, Charlotte and Junior, I cried and like many New Zealanders was hooked on their tragic stories. Newspapers across the country filled up with letters, columns and editorials about the disease and the vaccination that would release us from its grip. Then the NZ Herald ran an article extolling an educational program in South Auckland schools. The accompanying picture showed a cozy classroom of five year olds playing with oversized, multicolored cubes with words like scarring and death attached to the sides. And it dawned on me: we may be in the middle of an epidemic but we are also in the middle of a massive advertising and promotion campaign. In many ways it’s an entirely new public health environment where the concept of informed parental consent is being undermined by direct advertising to children and where vaccination is being turned into a moral duty, the gold standard of good parenting that only the most careless caregiver would shun.

But as recently as January 2000 Health Minister Annette King was extolling the findings of a landmark two-year Meningococcal Disease study that clearly demonstrated the link between the disease and poor housing and overcrowded living conditions. “Members of this government have been saying that for years, but the link was consistently denied by Jenny Shipley and members of her former government,” she said.

But to Dr Jane O’Hallahan, the Director of the Meningococcal B Immunization Programme it was never that simple. “The poverty theory,” she says, “oversimplifies a complex situation.”

She’s right. Meningococcal disease, and New Zealand’s experience with it, is far more complex than the Ministry of Health’s glossy brochures, their website or any of the articles and information promoting vaccination would have us believe.

Take risk as an example. I’m a middle class Pakeha with a reasonable standard of living. If I had a baby would she be at risk? Yes, says Dr O’Hallahan, citing the ‘devastating epidemic’ we’re in the middle of.          

But calculating out the MOH’s own figures that show 5400 of us have contracted the disease and 220 have died from all strains of it, the risk for New Zealanders suffering from the Nesseria meningitides B strain, the one causing all the trouble, is 0.007%.  Put another way, 99.993% of us will not fall ill from meningitis. Of those who do and survive, up to a fifth are left with disability.  At the latest figures that’s a total of 1,080 New Zealanders over 13 years, or just 18 people a year.

While we’ve been in the grip of this ‘uncontrolled epidemic’ 203,387 New Zealanders were injured on our roads and 7632 were killed. While Looking Upstream - a Ministry of Health report released in March - estimates 11,000 people die from diet-related causes such as heart disease every year. That’s 30 per cent of all deaths, far eclipsing deaths from tobacco, drugs, alcohol, motor accidents, violence and meningitis.

And it turns out the bugs that cause meningitis are fairly common. The Ministry of Health, whose figures are based on nasal swabbing, recently found 22 percent of students swabbed in Otago carried meningococcal bacteria, with only two percent carrying the B strain. But in 2000 the Lancet reported that by doing the far more accurate tonsillar tissue test, the disease could be found in 45% of the population. Studies also found that despite such high carriage rates and the mobility of the bacteria, progression to invasive disease occurs only rarely.   

Add all this to a 1982 study that showed natural immunity to meningitis is reinforced throughout life by repeated and intermittent carriage of different strains, and you have to ask why some of us are so susceptible to this cruel disease, while for others it’s self-limiting and harmless?

For a start numerous studies have found associative factors such as parental smoking,  Vitamin C levels, panadol use, overcrowded, unhygienic housing conditions and iron anemia are all irrefutably linked to the disease (a recent Auckland study found iron deficiencies in 29% of young New Zealand children). In June, New Scientist magazine said an extensive survey of baby foods has found the presence of a bacterium linked to a handful of fatal outbreaks of meningitis. The magazine said the meningitis-causing bug has been found in powdered infant formula before, but this study was the first to detect it in dried infant food. Premature babies and those with a weakened immune system are at particular risk, they said.

Meanwhile a 2001 study from the Netherlands found convincing evidence of genetic background in the invasion of meningococci. 

Since genetic testing is, for now, out of the question, and the vaccine has been found not to confer herd immunity – meaning only the individual and not their wider community is protected, and nutrition as a preventive seems to have fallen out of favor, perhaps there’s a way for an individual to find out if they’re already immune.

I phone a range of doctor’s surgeries and ask if there’s a test. The answer is similar at each. “We’ve not been given any information on that.” “There is no test.”     

Of course there is a test. But like everything with this disease, it’s not that simple.

The trials, run by Dr Diana Lennon at Auckland University, have shown a minimum of three vaccinations is necessary to raise antibody levels. And despite the fact the opening statement on the official consent form says: Parents/Guardians this is all it takes to protect them, up to 25 per cent of participants gained little or no immunity.

How do they know that? “It’s a blood test,” says Dr Lennon. But then she goes on to say it won’t be available to the public because there is no clear point at which it can be said that antibodies are conferring immunity.

Pardon?

“Decisions on the efficacy of the vaccine are made on a population base, not an individual level,” she says, “therefore an antibody test prior to or between receiving the vaccine would be meaningless.”  She admits it took her ages to cotton on to the concept. With less time to dwell on it, it strikes me that it’s only meaningless for those of us who want to know if our children have natural immunity, while for the trial participants, for the licensing committee, for the government spending 200 million, it’s the primary way of assessing the efficacy of the vaccine. In other words, it makes no sense to use antibodies as proof of acquired immunity and then say that antibodies are not a good measure of immunity.

So given the MOH intends to vaccinate one million New Zealanders it seems appropriate to find out just exactly what’s in that little vial of clear liquid. When asked by a group of concerned parents about the ingredients besides those published on the data sheet (outer membrane vesicles,1.65 mg of aluminum and histidine) MedSafe, the government organization responsible for safety in medicine was unequivocal. That information is withheld under the provisions of the Official Information Act on the grounds that it’s not in the public interest to know.

Okay, how about the vaccine culture, the agents used to deactivate the bacteria and agents used to purify the vaccine?

“Withheld.”

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On the streets of South Auckland you may as well be in space: no one can hear you scream. In the mid 80s I lived and worked there. In the 1990s, working firstly for 3 News and then One News as a crime reporter, I haunted what the Herald on Sunday called “the streets of no shame” on a weekly basis – camera crews have been known to count their hubcaps before leaving the area. When the police hunt for serial rapist Joseph Thompson was at it’s high point, I recall protesting loudly in the newsroom every time I was assigned to the case. The rea­son? The rapist frequently got in through unlocked doors and windows. After years of attacks, journalists could still venture out in South Auckland and be asked by locals, “What serial rapist?”. While middle New Zealand obsessed, many South Aucklanders weren’t even aware.

The Badlands, an area of real estate that roughly begins at a latitude running between Mangere Bridge and Mt Wellington; it’s a line many Aucklanders dare not cross, if we still had old-fashioned maps they’d shade out large chunks of South Auckland with the words, “Here be Dragons”.

It was in South Auckland that 12 year old Bailey Kurariki was part of a mob who brutally slaughtered pizza delivery worker Michael Choy. It was in South Auckland that 14 year old Ngatai Rewiti chose a year ago to haul an 8kg hunk of con­crete up to a motorway overbridge and drop it on an unsuspect­ing motorist.

"While I appreciate the ongoing concerns about the health of people living around New Plymouth, from the advice I have received from Ministry officials, I am satisfied that the monitoring and investigation carried out around IWD previously were adequate to show that significant exposure of the local population did not occur." - Health Minister Annette King, quoted in Investigate, October 2000

THE ‘ERIN BROKOVICH’-STYLE SCANDAL IN NEW ZEALAND'S BACKYARD

Outbreaks of rare diseases and tumours are appearing in clusters around New Zealand, close to chemical factories. Why doesn’t the Government want to investigate? SIMON JONES discovers what the authorities don’t want you to know:

Walk down any street in New Plymouth and you will probably hear a mixture of coughing and spluttering. Look inside any school and there appears to be more special needs children than is the norm for a city the size of New Plymouth. It’s often been said that everyone knows someone with a serious disease, whether it be cancer or multiple sclerosis.

Bad luck? Possibly, but for the last 15 years a group of residents have turned scientists to uncover what they say is a national health scandal - and one which, despite the government and media’s persistent attempts to ignore, won’t go away.

They may sound like conspiracy theorists in overdrive - and there is little in the way of official evidence and health statistics to back up what they say. But here is the frightening thing: If, in this real-life game of Fact or Fiction?, only 10 percent of what the residents say is true, we have a huge health scandal on our hands - the magnitude and implications of which are unimaginable.

The story centres around one of the city’s major employers, the Ivon Watkins Dow Plant.

Since the early 1960s, and up until 1987, it manufactured the 2,4,5T herbicide - which contains the deadly dioxin also used to form Agent Orange - a weapon of huge destruction in the Vietnam War.

In New Zealand and around the world 2,4,5T is used to kill scrub, gorse and blackberry. In Vietnam, with concentrations of dioxin much higher, it had the same effect - to the extent where it devastated the country’s crops and caused major health problems amongst veterans, including cancer, multiple sclerosis, while creating learning difficulties amongst the vets’ children.

Is it just coincidence that many in New Plymouth - and in areas around New Zealand, where this herbicide was extensively sprayed, complain about the same health problems?

For years governments, both here and overseas, turned a blind eye to the damaging effects of dioxin, refusing to admit that there was any link between Agent Orange and health problems suffered by vets.

Yet recently, in a draft report leaked to ... (to continue reading this article, please click on the shopping cart icon)

As Investigate closes in on New Zealand's biggest-ever toxic waste scandal, we now have hard evidence that a deadly herbicide used in the Vietnam War is buried under part of New Plymouth city. IAN WISHART & SIMON JONES provide team coverage:

A former top official at New Plymouth’s Ivon Watkins Dow chemical factory has confirmed the worst fears of residents – part of the town may be sitting on a secret toxic waste dump containing the deadly Vietnam War defoliant Agent Orange.

The official, who has proven his identity and executive ranking in documents provided to Investigate, says the company owned a large piece of land “very close to the chemical plant, which we called ‘the Experimental Farm’. We bulldozed big pits and dumped thousands of tonnes of chemicals there”.

And what did the chemical cocktail include?

“There have been rumours circulating for some time, never proven, that IWD was supplying the defoliant Agent Orange to be used in the Vietnam War. The allegation is true. I was on the management committee of Ivon Watkins Dow and I supported the plan to export Agent Orange. In fact, it went ahead on my casting vote.

“People who’d served in the armed forces made a strong case for the need to defoliate the jungle, because of the risk to servicemen from ambush or sniper fire from the undergrowth.

“So we began manufacturing this Agent Orange, but it didn’t meet the international specifications and probably had an excess of ‘nasties’ in it. The problem was, we didn’t consider the product was harmful to humans at the time.

“Our scientists relied on assurances and technical data provided to them by Dow Chemicals in the USA. We were led to believe it was safe. The whole reason I supported Agent Orange is because we thought we were giving our boys on the ground a hand.

“To avoid detection, we shipped the Agent Orange to …” (to continue reading, please click on the shopping cart icon to purchase this article)

Photos of affected babies, and secret Dow memos - four years before TV3's 'Let us Spray' documentary aired

It seemed like a gangland killing, but not a very good one. The discovery of a handless body with its head par­tially severed floating off Wellington’s Owhiro Bay last month set off a major police investigation that’s left the country speculating as to motive and detail. But for one Wellington man, it’s all too close to home. One of his family members is 21 year old award-winning appren­tice butcher Peter Leach – no relation to the Mad Butcher of the same name – who’s been arrested and charged with being an accessory after the fact.

The man, whom we’ll refer to as “John Smith”, contacted the magazine angry at what he feels is the way the first lawyer he hired to defend Leach left him hanging – metaphorically-speaking.

But in the process of explaining the grievance, Smith has been able to fill in a lot of the blanks in the murder mystery: how it happened, why it happened and who allegedly did it.

The first person police arrested, 21 year old Daniel Moore, has been charged with Stanlake’s murder and is also in custody. Moore is understood to be the son of a political activist in the Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party, and Smith claims it was a feud over drugs that led to the killing.

“I don’t know if I should say, but I suppose it doesn’t really matter: $10,000, some drugs. That Stanlake – all those rental properties he had – this is what I’ve been told (I won’t say where from) but they were all full [of hydroponically-grown cannabis]. He had guys growing for him. Daniel’s just an idiot, thinks he’s really…don’t know what you’d call him, he’s an idiot.”

Smith claims one of Moore’s family had been doing work ...