Government pledges $10m for rheumatic fever vaccine

Friday, 19 November 2021

Associate Health Minister Dr Ayesha Verrall, at Takapuwahia Marae in Porirua, announces $10 million in funding for the development of a vaccine for rheumatic fever.

Aupito William Sio says he may have been a professional rugby player if he hadn’t contracted rheumatic fever as a child. Instead, the disease meant he was hospitalised for more than three months and was on penicillin injections for years.

The fatigue meant Sio – the eldest of nine – could no longer help with his siblings, so his mother had to stop working and the whānau lost an income.

Speaking at Takapūwāhia Marae in Porirua on Friday, Sio, who is minister for Pacific peoples and also has an associate health portfolio, said he developed the illness while growing up in Ōtara in the 1970s. “None of our children should have to experience life with rheumatic fever,” he said.

Sio joined Associate Health Minister Dr Ayesha Verrall at the marae, where Verrall announced $10 million in government funding to support development of a vaccine to help prevent rheumatic fever and rheumatic heart disease.

Associate Health Minister Aupito William Sio explains how rheumatic fever changed his life and meant he had to take penicillin injections for years.

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Helmut Modlik, chief executive of Ngati Toa, says it’s nonsense that so many young rangatahi are still exposed to poor housing in New Zealand.

The University of Auckland will lead research next year into the vaccine development, which will complement existing work underway in Australia.

Funding will also support surveillance of Group A streptococcus, more infrastructure for laboratory testing, and preparations for clinical trials in New Zealand.

Rheumatic fever remains endemic in Māori and Pacific communities, despite being otherwise generally confined to Third World countries. In the year to June 30, 107 people were hospitalised for the first time with the illness in Aotearoa.

“As an infectious diseases doctor at our Capital & Coast hospital here in this rohe, I cared for rangatahi with some of the worst outcomes from rheumatic fever,” Verrall said.

”All the people I cared for were Māori or Pacific young people, and all were poor.”

Helmut Modlik, chief executive of Ngāti Toa iwi, which hosted the ministers and officials on the marae, hoped a vaccine would turn that around.

“When you reflect on how it arises, out of kiddies living in homes that are cold and poorly insulated… that’s just nonsense in this land, that so many of our young people are exposed to that.”

Ngāti Toa was investing heavily in quality and affordable housing for iwi members, he said.

“But I'm very pleased the Government has done this, because this (investment) is just another string in a bow of a response. If they can pull this one off that will make a big difference.”

Rates of initial hospitalisation for rheumatic fever in Auckland are 240 times for Pacific peoples and 87 times for Māori, compared with non-Māori and non-Pacific people Aucklanders, according to a report released on Friday from the Prime Minister’s Chief Science Advisor.

The report found vaccination could make a major difference to the rates of infection and subsequent complications of rheumatic fever and rheumatic heart disease.