Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 2 October 2019

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Health

Quarterly Meeting on Health Issues: Discussion

Photo of Kate O'ConnellKate O'Connell (Dublin Bay South, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I have five minutes, not one question. Pulling all the stuff together than I have been talking about in the previous two rounds, has the Department plans for a massive public health campaign in terms of identifying what we can learn from where we failed before? I refer to the vaccination rate with HPV vaccination dropping to 52%, which was not on the Minister's watch but it did happen, and to the great effort by all the witnesses, the late Laura Brennan and many others such that we collectively have got that rate back up. In terms of public health education, if we look to some of the developing countries such as Rwanda with its vaccination programme, the programme is front-loaded with education and their system has worked well. We are failing because we probably did not cop on quickly enough to the power of the Internet and of false claims. As the Minister knows, I have my Bill, which is waiting to progress. It is clear from the conversation about measles and mumps that people do not seem to realise how serious these conditions are. The generation that saw these conditions is largely older. My own mother is a retired public health nurse who specialised in infectious diseases so I am very much aware of the dangers associated with them. However, it is very hard to fear what we cannot see. Are we going to do anything to try to mitigate the risk of the propagation of false claims? I am thinking of something to do with the value of science and fact, our institutions, the value of research and development. Organisations such as the Irish Cancer Society clearly have public health as their remit. There is a need to identify those whose remit is probably not public health but the bottom line on their balance sheet. Beliefs are hard to change and I believe the only way we can do that is through education. There is a shift whereby people are not going to listen to the celebrity chef as to what they should take to cure their terminal cancer. However, the Department and the Minister need to pre-empt what is coming down the road in terms of slick marketing campaigns to get into people's pockets, essentially, and in some cases into the pockets of the Department, I would say, in terms of the funding of medicinal cannabis.

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