Alstonville mother, Mrs Yvonne Pearson, spoke to reporter Katherine Breen Kurucsev about bringing up a rubella-damaged child in the 1960s, an illness now preventable through immunisation. Pictured is a young Leslie Pearson.

Separation from his family was to mark much of Leslie Pearson's formative years. Born in Ballina Hospital with serious birth defects in 1962, he was quickly transferred to the Brisbane Children's Hospital where he spent the first three months of his life. It was to be many years before Yvonne Pearson discovered the rubella she caught during her pregnancy had caused her son's problems.

Although rubella (German measles) can be a mild illness in children and adults, it has devastating lifelong consequences in unborn children should their mother catch it in the first 20 weeks of pregnancy. According to the World Health Organisation, 300,000 children still die each year from rubella.

Yvonne held her newborn once in her arms before he was taken away. The Pearsons were not allowed to visit Leslie in Brisbane because of the fear of infecting his fragile immune system. That was how they did things then, she recalls with sadness. Leslie had been born underweight with an immature mouth and an incomplete oesophagus (feeding tube). Even after pioneering surgery to try to rectify this, he was not expected to see his first birthday. Against the odds, he survived and was to undergo another six operations before the problem was fixed.

On top of these difficulties, Leslie was also deaf. When he was four years of age, the Education Department insisted he went to a Brisbane boarding school for the deaf and blind because there were no appropriate facilities in the Northern Rivers.

"In that era it was thought best that children who were deaf should not remain with their parents, who had no skills to educate them. At the time we all just accepted that was so. You did what you were told for the benefit of the child, even though emotionally you were in the pit."

She visited him one weekend a month. She wept when she saw him, but the enforced separations from birth had made Leslie detached and he never cried. After two years, Yvonne was asked to collect him because the Pearsons had been unable to relocate to Brisbane and the school needed his place for a Queensland child.

Although by this stage she also had a baby daughter, Leeona, she had been suffering from chronic depression and recalls the day she collected her son as the happiest of her life. Educating the deaf requires skills and knowledge; she knew this, but the separation had been emotionally devastating. Having Leslie home gave her a new determination and she began to investigate how he could be educated without having to go away again. Eventually the lobbying and letter writing paid off and she acknowledges the sitting member of parliament at the
time, Bruce Duncan, as instrumental in the process.

The first classroom for six local deaf children was actually an old cloakroom in the East Lismore Demonstration School. Yvonne describes a system she says was totally inadequate for the needs of deaf children. She believes society would have formed a better relationship with its deaf had there been more resources available. However, because of the lobbying of several organisations since those early days, Yvonne says Lismore's school for the deaf is now second to none.

To compensate for his deafness and other problems, Leslie does have the gift of extraordinary and quick eyesight. As a child he would sit for hours in trees content to watch the birds and take long walks in the bush to observe native wildlife. He has a flair for bowls and has represented NSW at the Australian Deaf Games. To cap it all, he has just been voted the number one player at his Sydney bowls club.

At 10 years of age Leslie went to Brisbane to have another operation on his oesophagus. Dr Simon Latham, a paediatrician and the recently retired director of Brisbane North in Queensland Health, spotted the boy and asked Yvonne if he could carry out some tests. These confirmed he had caught rubella from his mother in the womb. Yvonne remembers Dr Latham saying to her: "Had we been quicker and smarter, we would have had that vaccine then and been able to prevent Leslie's tragedy." To this day, Dr Latham is a keen advocate of immunisation and is horrified at the carnage rubella still causes to unborn babies.

Yvonne too is passionately supportive of immunisation. When she heard about the new rubella vaccine in 1970, she immediately made an appointment with her doctor so her daughter would be protected. She gets angry when she hears people speaking against immunisation: "Why do they want to botch it up and put us back 20 years?" she asks. "Do we immunise and take a possible risk or do we take the greater risk of damaging an unborn child?" Her answer is emphatic that we should not risk infecting unborn children.

"We are still dealing with the deafness and disabilities that arose out of not having immunisation," she says.

"The damage it caused was to influence my life. When I see people carrying on about immunisation I feel sick to the pit of my stomach as to what they might be doing to a pregnant woman walking around. Have they thought of that? But epidemics of [rubella] again we will have. There is no way we will escape if we do not immunise."


This article was published in local media in January 1999.