Dying from mistrust in Ukraine

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 20 June 2019

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Until recently, health authorities in developed countries appeared to be well on the way to wiping out measles – a highly contagious disease that’s one of the leading causes of vaccine-preventable deaths, particularly in children. But now measles is on the rise again, and Ukraine is worst-hit. More than 100,000 people have caught the disease since 2017, and 15 have died already this year.

Parents who could have protected their children often failed to do so – mainly because of a mass mistrust of vaccine, spread partly by doctors, including leading medical specialists. Tim Whewell travels to Ukraine to meet bereaved parents and worried health chiefs - and find out why vaccination rates fell so abruptly in just a few years. It’s a story of lack of confidence in the state, inadequate medical training, government complacency and political manipulation that’s had deadly consequences.

(Image: One-year-old girl being given a measles vaccine shot in Kiev health clinic, 2019. Credit: Brendan Hoffman/Getty Images)

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to assignment on the BBC World Service. I'm Tim Huell.
0:05.9	I'm in a country churchyard in Western Ukraine. There's a lovely sweet smell of newly mown
0:11.7	grass after summer rain, but here on the edge of the cemetery
0:15.1	is a newly dug mound of earth wet after the rain. There's a jam jar here, a very fresh,
0:21.1	beautiful red roses.
0:23.0	I'm a serie, we're not a sphizem, I said,
0:26.0	okay, but role is stupid.
0:30.0	My son has just got 18 on the other brilliant boy and he studied medicine in Vignica Medical Academy and he was the precious thing I've ever had.
0:41.0	As for every mother, her child is a precious.
0:44.0	This is the grave of someone who died much too soon,
0:50.0	a young man who was just setting out in life.
0:53.0	Seri Bhutenko.
0:55.0	Sorry, I know, it's very difficult to talk about it.
0:59.0	It was his dream to become medic. He was living for this and when he just entered the university
1:09.2	it was so hard for him during the first two months to study Latin to study medicine but soon
1:16.4	he became more and more excited about it and only thing he could talk about it was
1:21.8	medicine it was anatomy, every talked, we started, it was about medicine.
1:28.0	I'm just a little bit. Oksana Butanker's son, Sirhe, wanted to spend his life.
1:37.0	Oksana Butanker's son, Seri, wanted to spend his life curing people,
1:42.0	but he himself died of complications of a disease for which
1:46.2	there's no cure.
1:47.7	Measles is dangerous infectious disease which affects not only children but affects adults. It's a disease which can lead
	...

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