Juniper Russo on SBS Radio

Last month, I gave a radio interview for SBS in Sydney, Australia. It was during the onset of the Disneyland measles outbreak and another outbreak in Germany, both which had alarmed so many experts that they made news overseas. Parents and physicians worried that growing anti-vaccine rhetoric in their own communities could encourage widespread outbreaks of measles.

I was very pleased with the work of Lin Taylor, who is a journalist working hard to give accurate and timely information about news happening in Australia and all over the world. In the article and radio interview, she states,

"As a young mother, who fell pregnant at 20, Ms Russo said she was naïve and scared of the challenges ahead.

"I didn't know how to tell good information from bad information. So I got very easily misled by this subculture of natural parenting and I got swept into the fear – which is what led me to make those mistakes.

"I wanted to believe that children are completely safe without vaccines," the 27-year-old mother of two said. "I heard people saying that they were dangerous. It was very easy to mistake that for real science. It was really easy to fall into this trap of mass hysteria."

In February, an unvaccinated 18-month-old boy died from measles in Berlin, Germany. This was the first known fatality among more than 570 recorded measles cases in the German capital since October 2014. The resurgence of the preventable disease in Germany, as well as in parts of the United States, coincides with a movement among some parents to refuse to vaccinate their children.

The so-called anti-vaccination movement in which fears about potential side effects of vaccines, fuelled by now-debunked theories suggesting a link to autism, have led a small minority of parents to refuse to allow their children to be inoculated. "

Read the rest of the story here.