The mother of a 10-year-old girl who died from complications of measles has urged parents to have their children vaccinated amid a surge of cases.
Renae Archer was too young to have the MMR vaccine when she caught the infection at just five months old.
A decade later, she was diagnosed with subacute sclerosing panencephalitis, a very rare brain disease. She died in 2023.
Her mother Becky believes Renae might not have caught measles if more people had inoculated their children.
The warning comes as rates of vaccine uptake continue to fall. The recent death of a child with measles at Alder Hey Hospital in Liverpool put the focus on a surge of cases in a city with low levels of vaccination.
It has left communities with rates of vaccination below the 95% level seen to provide herd immunity, where enough people are protected to prevent the virus spreading.
Becky Archer said: “It does make me quite sad and angry because they are potentially putting their children at risk.
“We just want people to open their eyes to someone that’s actually been through it and not the nonsense that’s being spread out on social media or on telly.
“I just want people to be knowledgeable of how serious a situation can be.”
‘We just want people to open their eyes’, Becky Archer says
The latest figures on childhood vaccination show that coverage in the UK has been falling in recent years and is now below that target of 95% for all vaccines by age five.
The vaccination rate for England is lower than in other UK nations, and particularly low in London.
Just 60% in Hackney have had their full measles vaccination course by their fifth birthday, compared to 89.2% on average across Scotland – though the rate in Scotland has also fallen from 93% a decade earlier.
Outside of London, the North West now…
