United States: The latest evidence that ember on, childhood vaccinations is not assured is a new federal report indicating that the number of kindergartners who were allowed to opt out of the vaccinations during the last school year was the highest on record.
That means one school year after another more than 125 thousand new students are immunized with none of the childhood vaccines, meanwhile measles vaccination rate of kindergartners has decreased below the federal reference rate for four consecutive years, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and the Prevention.
At the same time, which is July of this year, U.S measles cases reached three times the number seen in all of 2023.
As reported by HealthDay, “Public health officials fear that immunization coverage in kindergarteners may be going down.” Childhood vaccines are actually safe and effective and have made a tremendous difference in minimizing morbidity and mortality from what use to be common fatal diseases, said Dr. Marcus Plescia, chief medical officer and also for the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials to CNN.
Lori Tremmel Freeman, CEO of the National Association of County and City Health Officials, said the same.
“The bigger picture is this: Overall vaccination rates dropped in 35 states and 14 of those states saw their vaccination rate is drop by at least one whole point,” responded Freeman to CNN. “What that translates to is about 280,000 students without documentation of full immunization.”
“But the more you go granular and think of local communities and neighborhoods that is where the risk can be different because you start seeing these big pockets of communities that are hesitating on the vaccine,” she said.
‘We often see congregations of the same people together in these communities, and disease can spread rapidly because they all have similar beliefs.’By how much has measles vaccination rate dropped?
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a part of the U.S. Department of Health and also Human Services has established the minimum coverage of 95 percent; number of children in the kindgarten who must have two immunizations dosage of the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR).
However, the coverage dipped during the pandemic and it hasn’t rebounded. The measles vaccination rate fell again last year to 92.7% coverage for the kindergartens in the 2023-24 school year, the CDC data showed.
Rates for other state-mandated vaccinations which includes the diptheria, tetanus and acellular pertussis known as DTaP, and the polio also dropped.
Last school year the vaccine exemptions reached the highest level ever reported with roughly 3.3% of the kindergartners getting an exemptions for one of the more required vaccines and the vast majority were non-medical exemptions the data showed.
Not surprisingly, there have already been outbreaks this year of the infections diseases in the pockets of the communities with low vaccination rates, Freeman said.
There was measles outbreak last March in the Chicago, where at leasts 57 cases were linked to a migrant shelter along with a February outbreak at an elementary school in Florida’s Broward County.
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