More parents are opting not to have children vaccinated with all the shots health officials recommend, endangering their kids and fostering disease outbreaks, a study said.
While all states require schoolchildren to be vaccinated, 21 allow parents to exempt their own kids for personal reasons. Clusters of unvaccinated children are growing in these states, leading to outbreaks of measles and pertussis, or whooping cough, according to the analysis published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The number of mandated vaccinations has increased in recent years so children now get as many as 33 inoculations, most of them shots, to prevent 15 diseases, said Lance Rodewald, immunization director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. While routine coverage has never been higher nationally, the local clusters of unvaccinated youngsters are a mounting concern, he said.
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"Infectious diseases are transmitted at the local level,' said Saad Omer, an epidemiologist at the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University in Atlanta, and the lead author of todayÃs study. "We have shown that vaccine refusals cluster geographically and that there is an association between those clusters and outbreaks of pertussis."
The number of vaccinations recommended by the CDC has increased by nine for boys and 12 for girls since 2000, not including the annual flu shots health officials added to the list last year, Rodewald said. Most states don't require children to get flu shots to attend school.
Some parents worry about the risk of side effects and believe that mercury, previously used as a vaccine preservative, is linked to rising rates of autism, the study noted. There's no evidence to support that concern, Omer said.
The FDA has been working with vaccine manufacturers for at least a decade to reduce or eliminate mercury.
