Widespread vaccination programs have been the key to driving many crippling diseases to extinction. This boils down to one, simple, irrefutable fact: they work and are incredibly safe. However the anti-vaccination movement, which asserts all sorts of non-scientific dribble, has caused vaccine rates to drop to levels where herd immunity starts to become compromised. This presents a number of challenges as unvaccinated children and adults are not only a threat to themselves but to others who have contact with them. Indeed the problem may be worse than first thought as it appears that even among those who do vaccinate the completion rate is low, with 1 in 3 two year olds in the USA not having completed the recommended vaccination course.
The study, published RTI International (a non-profit research institute based in North Carolina), showed that up until a child was 2 years old the state of their vaccinations was quite fluid. Indeed the vast majority of children weren’t compliant with the required vaccination schedule with most of them receiving a dose outside the recommended window. Upon reaching approximately 24 months of age however most had caught up with the required schedule although a staggering 33% of them were still non-compliant at this age. This might not seem like much of an issue since the majority do eventually get their vaccinations however there are sound scientific reasons for the scheduling of vaccines. Ignoring them has the potential to limit, or completely negate, their efficacy.
The standard vaccine schedule has been developed to maximise the efficacy of vaccines and also to reduce the risk that, should a child contract that disease, potentially life threatening complications are reduced or eliminated. The pertussis (whooping cough) vaccine is estimated to have an extremely high efficacy rate in young children, up to 95%, but that begins to drop off rapidly if the vaccine is administered later in life. Similar efficacy slopes are seen in other childhood disease vaccines such as the combined MMR vaccine. At the same time these vaccines are administered around the time when the potential impacts of the disease are at their greatest. Missing a vaccine at that point runs the risk of severe complications should the disease be contracted at that point.
It’s unsurprising that the study found that the western states had the lowest rates of vaccination as that’s where the anti-vaccination movement has been most active. Just this year there was an outbreak of measles there and the year before that there was a whooping cough epidemic. Interestingly the southern states had the highest rates of vaccination as shown by the snippet of this infographic above. Whilst the anti-vaccination movement is undeniably an influence in the hodge-podge vaccination approach that seems prevalent the blame here lies solely on the parents who aren’t adhering to the vaccination schedule better.
It’s understandable that some of these things can slip as the challenges of being a parent are unending but when it comes to their health there’s really no other competing priority. For parents this means that they’ll need to pay better attention to their doctor’s advice and ensure that the vaccine schedule is adhered to more closely. Additionally the government could readily help in alleviating this issue by developing better reminder systems, ones that are more in tune with the modern parent’s lives. Hopefully these statistics alone will be enough to jar most into action.
