22 October

The 'living with the virus' slogan. Anybody uttering it needs to explain exactly what they mean. Here's an example - whooping cough. Pertussis. We 'live with' it. There's a vaccine. Between 2008 and 2012 we had a whooping cough epidemic, over 140,000 cases, and 40,000 in 2011 alone. It's evolving to become a superbug, because we're not controlling it. If you get an outbreak in a school, kids get sent home. It causes massive disruption, public health action. Parents need to skip work to look after the kids. I caught it myself a few years ago, despite being vaccinated. Vaccines aren't a magic bullet, to 'live with' an infectious pathogen, you need to constantly fight it, at multiple levels. Not vax-and-forget.