Vaccine row in Italy over law banning children from school if they haven’t received jabs

A row over vaccines has erupted in Italy as the country’s new populist government fights to oveturn a law that bans children without jabs from attending school.

A law adopted by the Democratic Party government last year made it compulsory for pre-school kids to be vaccinated against 10 diseases, including measles, tetanus and poliomyelitis.

Parents who have not vaccinated their children by the time they reach school age – six years old in Italy – face a fine of up to 500 euros.

Italy’s new government is trying to overturn a law that bans children without jabs from attending school

The law was brought in during an outbreak of measles that saw the number of cases in Italy hit 5,004 in 2017, up from 870 the previous year. 

The new administration – formed of the anti-establishment Five Star Movement and the nationalist League – is leading the charge to have the law rolled back.

Last week, Italian lawmakers approved the amendment to compulsory vaccination for pre-schoolers to the 2019-20 school year.

The World Health Organization (WHO) says 93 per cent to 95 per cent of the population must be vaccinated to fight diseases like measles.  

Italy’s measles jab rate has lagged far behind that goal, hovering around 85 per cent for the first dose and 83 per cent for the second dose as of 2015. 

New health minister Giulia Grillo has drafted a new bill introducing what she calls a ‘flexible obligation’, encouraging the use of compulsory vaccination only over short periods and when WHO coverage rate is low.

Grillo, a doctor, claims there will be guarantees that children who haven’t been immunised could be enrolled in classes where the World Health Organisation recommended coverage is assured.

However she also caused outrage when, in an interview with major daily Corriere Della Sera on Wednesday, she said that it wasn’t realistic to ‘make people believe that no one will die’ of measles. 

 Last week Italian lawmakers approved the amendment, meaning children starting school next year won't need to have the jabs

 Last week Italian lawmakers approved the amendment, meaning children starting school next year won’t need to have the jabs

Parents currently have to present pre-school institutions with booklets that list the vaccines, updated by the doctors who administer them.

For the 2019-20 school year plans were in place for educators to get vaccine information on each child directly from local health authorities, a measure designed to bypass the possibility of anti-vax parents falsifying documentation.

That measure was adopted in order to fight back against a drop in the number of people being vaccinated that had taken coverage below the 95 percent limit recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO).

That coverage ratio is the minimum required to create the communal immunity that staves off diseases and protects people with compromised immune systems who can’t be vaccinated.

Coverage rates increased in Italy following the enaction of the previous government’s law, but many regions remain well below the WHO threshold for a number of illnesses.

Data from Italy’s National Health Institute released in July showed that four people — including a 10-month-old baby — had died from measles between January and May, the same number that died in the whole of 2017. In total over 1,700 people had contracted the disease, while last year 5,400 cases were recorded. 



Read more at DailyMail.co.uk