Community health advocates are accusing the Government of dropping the ball in its efforts to wipe out rheumatic fever after several regions have reported a spike in cases this year despite ongoing work to improve living standards.
Damp, cold and mouldy homes are drivers of serious health conditions like rheumatic fever.
Data from the 2018 Census showed more than a third of Māori and Pacific people live in damp homes, compared to one fifth for New Zealand overall.
Lotoalofa Maka, now 22, suffers from the preventable illness, which was the reason his family moved to New Zealand from Samoa.
Their Porirua home is cold, damp and leaking, a bad combination for someone with a respiratory illness.
"It's cold, when it rains you can't see outside,” father Save Maka said.
Porirua is one of the areas where rheumatic fever has made a comeback, with nine cases so far this year in the wellington region, when there's normally two.
The Bay of Plenty and Taupo regions have also had nine cases, compared to three or four usually.
Porirua GP Dr Esela Natano had a case in February, his first in about three years.
“This is a devastating illness, especially if you have heart disease,” Pacific Health Plus GP Dr Natano said.
“When we were doing food packages, on a really hot day, it was interesting to walk up to the house that was really cold and damp,” Pacific Health Plus director Lee Pearce said.
Lockdowns in cold, crowded homes may have contributed to the rise in cases, but one GP says there needs to be better access to medical services.
“In these areas of high need they need to be funded, they need to be backed by the Government in the community, not in hospitals, in the community, that is where the front line of care actually occurs,” Bryan Betty of the NZ College of GPs said.
Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield says rheumatic fever hasn't been overlooked by health authorities.
“It hasn't slipped under the radar, in fact we've had the radar on about rheumatic fever for about probably six to eight weeks now and been working with primary care to make sure that, because what we were worried about was people coming in with a sore throat,” he said.
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