THE health ministry has reminded parents that their children will not be admitted to schools next month if they are not fully immunised. The new school year starts on September 6.

Dr Christine Hammond-Gabbadon, acting director of the Family Health Services Unit in the ministry, said if parents were unsure of whether or not their children were fully immunized for their age, they should consult their public health nurse to be advised of what was needed and have their schedule updated.

“If you have been getting immunisation at an health centre, then they have a tracking register and if you have lost the card, you can get back the information from the health centre you have been to before. By law, the schools are not allowed to take the child in without immunisation and the parents are not allowed to say they don’t want their child to get it,” Dr Hammond-Gabbadon told JIS News. “There might be certain exceptions for medical reasons, but that’s about it,” she added.

Medical exemptions, she said, include cases where children are immuno compromised, that is, if the child is receiving treatment for diseases of the immune system such as HIV/AIDS or cancer.

“Then, you wouldn’t want to give a live vaccine. Vaccines are killed or very weakened parts of the germ, so if somebody has an immune system disease, that would reduce their immune levels, so they can’t react in the normal way to the vaccine and there are certain vaccines that we would not give, such as the oral polio and the live measles vaccine,” Hammond-Gabbadon explained.

She said the health ministry has been offering daily immunisation at its regional health centres, which already have set days on which they conduct child welfare visits or ‘baby clinics’, where parents bring their children to be immunised.

She told JIS News that the number of children being targeted in specific age cohorts was in the region of 60,000, which would include children in basic schools, those entering grade one and those entering high schools. “The immunization law speaks to children up to age seven. By law, they have to be fully immunised for school, which means the primary series and the two boosters at 18 months and age four (respectively). By the time a child enters grade one, they would have had these,” she said.

Dr Hammond-Gabbadon pointed out that full immunisation for an 18-month-old child was different from full immunisation for a six year-old and as such, the ministry was no longer stamping the card “fully immunized”, because, “if you are one year-old and you have had your one-year-old shot, then you are fully immunised, but at 18 months if you don’t get that booster, then you are not fully immunized”.

She said the aim of the Family Health Unit was to achieve at least 90 per cent coverage for children 12 to 23 months and that this thrust had been going fairly well with coverage presently at 80 per cent.