Worth a Shot

Recent news reports of measles outbreaks in Britain coupled with studies showing no link between childhood vaccinations and autism should reassure parents worried about putting their children through the recommended regime of shots. Numbers from the Centers for Disease Control show, however, that not everyone is getting the message that childhood vaccinations can be lifesavers, while posing very little risk.

In its latest Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, the CDC found that children entering kindergarten in Maine were less likely to have received all recommended immunizations than youngsters in other states. The report found that Maine ranked third from last in the percentage of kids getting the recommended polio and diphtheria-pertussis-tetanus shots. Nationally, 95.7 percent of children are vaccinated against measles and 96.1 percent for mumps and rubella. In Maine, only 89.2 percent of kindergarten pupils had received these shots, according to the MMWR report.

The director of the state’s immunization program says these numbers are inaccurate because the schools self-report the data so it is prone to errors. A more accurate measure of Maine’s vaccination rates is the annual National Immunization Survey, also conducted by the CDC, which surveys the immunization compliance in 2-year-olds. By this measure, 92.3 percent of Maine children between the ages of 19 and 35 months in 2002 had been vaccinated against measles, mumps and rubella, slightly above the national average of 91.6 percent. For polio, 94.6 percent of Maine children had been vaccinated while the national average was 90.2 percent.

Using either set of numbers, it is clear that work remains to reassure parents that childhood vaccinations, in addition to many being required for entrance to school, have far more benefits than downsides. One only has to look across the Atlantic to see what can happen when parents do not vaccinate their children. In the United Kingdom, vaccination rates have fallen below 80 percent and the number of measles cases has tripled since 2001. Many believe that fears about immunizations causing autism have led to decreases in vaccination rates.

However, recent studies have found that autism is characterized by rapid growth in brain size in a child’s early years and that the mercury preservative used in the vaccines is not linked to a rapid increase in autism around the world. In a Danish study, doctors found that after their country banned the use of the preservative thimerosal in 1992 there was no decrease in autism cases as one would expect if the preservative was the culprit, instead cases continued to skyrocket. Thimerosal use began to be phased out in the United States in 1999.

Parents who have yet to get the required shots for their children to attend kindergarten have a 90-day grace period to do so. Preventing diseases is certainly worth a shot.