As vaccination rates fall in Australia, a grieving British mother has a warning

Rebecca Archer's daughter, Renae, died more than a decade after contracting the measles virus as an infant. (ABC News: Alex Parsons) Link copiedShareShare articleWhen Rebecca Archer's five-month-old daughter Renae got a temperature, turned pale and struggled to breathe, she called an ambulance. They were taken to hospital straight away, where Renae was diagnosed with measles. The next day they were discharged and Renae went home with a drip. They isolated for a week and Renae fully recovered. That was in 2013 and there was a measles outbreak in their neighbourhood near Manchester in England's north-west. Vaccine uptake had dropped and cases were spreading fast among infants because they are not usually vaccinated against the virus until they turn one. Rebecca wanted to vaccinate her child, but she was too young. Now, with some preventable diseases on the rise again in Britain, Australia — where diphtheria has broken out — the United States and other countries, Rebecca has a warning for other parents: your child could die without a jab. Renae Archer contracted measles when she was too young to be vaccinated. (Supplied) When Renae got sick, it did not take long for her to recover. Rebecca did not think much more of it. What she did not know at the time was that measles can cause life-threatening complications, some of which can take years to surface. For the next decade, Rebecca says Renae developed normally. She said her "kind" and "bubbly" daughter excelled at school and made people laugh. But the measles virus she had contracted as a baby stayed in her body. It was silently replicating in her brain, with deadly consequences. "In the July before her 11th birthday, I got a call from the school to say she'd had a seizure," Rebecca said. That was the first sign that something was wrong. Doctors thought it was epilepsy and referred her to a specialist clinic. "She kept complaining of a headache and the kids being too loud around her … then the following week she had another seizure," Rebecca said. Addressing vaccine hesitancy requires skill and patience – some days, the people who do it feel like they’re drowning in a sea of lies. The seizures continued and her behaviour was changing, becoming increasingly uncharacteristic. She started snapping at her brothers and sisters, needed help showering and was hallucinating. For two months, Renae was in and out of hospital, but doctors were stumped. "She was just getting weaker. She was struggling to keep her eyes open; she slowly stopped eating," Rebecca said. "She was in ICU for around a week. She had a breathing tube and she was no longer talking." An MRI showed swelling on her brain, which worsened within a week. But it was not until days before her death in September 2023, that doctors finally worked out that Renae had subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE). Renae Archer's final days were spent on life support in hospital. (Supplied) The disease is a rare but progressive and fatal complication of measles and usually takes seven-to-10 years to produce symptoms. The answer came after a lumbar puncture and blood tests showed the measles virus was still in her body. Heavily pregnant with her third child, doctors told Rebecca and the family they had to think about turning off Renae's life support. She had a C-section the next day then returned to Renae's bedside as she slowly slipped away. "She was struggling and was distressed. I think that was the worst part," Rebecca said. "I was sat in the room thinking I just want her to be at peace. While this is a rare complication of measles, many others are much more common and severe in young children. Of those who contract the virus, a fifth of children will be hospitalised, one in 20 will get pneumonia, which is the leading cause of death, while one in 10 will develop an ear infection that can lead to permanent hearing loss. The UK is again in the throes of another measles outbreak with vaccination rates dropping every year since the COVID-19 pandemic. The World Health Organization (WHO) has taken away Britain's "elimination status", which means the virus is now spreading locally. Rebecca Archer says her oldest daughter, Renae, was her best friend. (Supplied) As a consultant epidemiologist at the UK's Health Security Agency, Vanessa Saliba has been at the forefront of the measles resurgence in the country. She said most of the cases were unvaccinated children under the age of 10. "What we have seen in the UK over the last decade is a year-on-year decline in uptake for our routine childhood immunisation programme," Dr Saliba said. She described measles as the "canary in the coal mine" because when vaccination rates fall it returns with a vengeance, given its contagious nature. "It will show up when your vaccine uptake rates fall, even if it's a small decline, and it will show you the communities and populations that are not protected by the vaccination," Dr Saliba said. "The drivers fo

As vaccination rates fall in Australia, a grieving British mother has a warning

Key takeaways

More in international