Fighting measles -Vaccinate your child

Wonderful medical advances sometimes quickly erase from folk memory the awful consequences of an unchecked disease.

Many of the young people becoming parents today need not worry about the possibility of one of their children contracting polio or TB because of successful vaccination programmes.

This should also be the case with measles, but as the current outbreak in West Cork shows, vaccinations must be universal and administered with discipline if a disease is to be more or less eradicated from the public sphere.

Measles is a nasty sickness leading to complications in almost one third of cases. Variations of the illness can have appalling consequences for unborn children, should an expectant mother fall victim to one. Vaccinations are freely available. Every parent should ensure their child is given this basic protection.