A vaccinologist has renewed calls for people to "seize the moment" and get immunised to protect themselves against measles.
Yesterday authorities confirmed two unborn babies died due to potential measles complications after a number of pregnant women caught the disease in Auckland.
There have been a total of 1307 cases of measles confirmed in Auckland for the year to date.
Today, senior lecturer at the University of Auckland, vaccinologist Dr Helen Petousis-Harris, called the loss of lives "the worst scenarios – ones you treated and yes, it was preventable".
She had warned weeks prior that the country was in danger of losing lives over the preventable disease.
"We're back again [to the dark ages] with a disease that the world is hoping to eradicate, so we are taking a big step back," Dr Helen Petousis-Harris told TVNZ1's Breakfast this morning.
She called the current outbreak a result of "what we didn't get right years ago that's coming back to bite us, where we go on about these immunity gaps in our young adults".
"We've got a lot of them still unvaccinated – a lot of them running to get vaccinated now, but now's a little bit late in terms of preventing this quite extensive and sustained outbreak."
Dr Petousis-Harris said people who failed to get vaccinated "probably [had] other things going on and it wasn't seen as something that was a priority at the time, and often, these things aren't until they suddenly become a bit of a crisis like this one".
She said people are "probably pulling miracles" over their attempts to catch up with immunising against the disease, adding that we "have made no preparation earlier for this and that we don't have enough vaccine supply to get it all out there at once".
She said we have "got no choice but to run and catch up at this stage and we've got to sort of seize the moment" and "strike while the iron's hot".
Dr Petousis-Harris advised people who were unsure of their vaccination status to "get it anyway, appreciating now that some people might wait until we get some vaccines".
"You can see the vulnerable groups, you can see what the possibility is, and we know what we have to do to plug that," she said.
"If we can get this solved now and we can keep vaccinating our young ones really well, like we have been doing, then there's no reason why we should see this again in the future.
"We can do this and we can reach all those people that we haven't reached in the last couple of decades … There's no reason why we should experience a sustained outbreak like this again."
Ms Petousis-Harris said while she believes it is "too early to get too optimistic" about the decline of the measles outbreak, there is no need to panic, adding that most pregnant women are immune to the disease.
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