![]() Yet the study also found the rate of kindergartners in California without up-to-date vaccinations rose slightly from 2016 to 2017, as the numbers of medical exemptions, students not subjected to immunization requirements and students overdue for vaccinations increased. The chance that two unvaccinated students would come into contact with each other at school fell to 4.56% in 2017, down from 26.02% in 2014, according to the study.Ĭlusters with high rates of students without up-to-date vaccinations also decreased substantially in Central and Southern California but continued to remain high in Northern California, the study found. The researchers found that the increase in vaccination rates reduced the chances that unvaccinated students would come into contact with each other, an easy way for measles to spread. And this is exactly what we are seeing,” he said. “We predicted that if we don’t change the trajectory we’ll start seeing larger and more frequent outbreaks. But to them, the future the data foretold was clear. The authors were concerned their study would appear alarmist, so they “cushioned” their message a bit,” Omer admitted. That’s more than 940,000 children who are now young adults. Omer’s study estimated that in 2013 alone, 4.5% of teens aged 13 to 17 had not received a single dose of measles-containing vaccine, years after they should have received both doses. At the time they submitted their study for publication, in June 2015, they estimated that 8.7 million children aged 17 and younger were vulnerable to the virus. Using data from 2008 to 2013, they calculated that 12.5% of children and adolescents were not protected against measles, with the biggest portion being children 3 and younger. In 2016 he and colleagues from Emory University published a study estimating the number of children and teenagers who are unprotected against measles. Saad Omer has been worrying about the growing number of measles-susceptible people in this country for a while. He added that national and state monitoring is not enough to effectively monitor infectious disease more needs to be done on the local and county level.Īs measles cases spread, the tinder for more outbreaks is growingĭr. “All disease transmission is local, just like politics,” said Saad Omer, a professor in global health and epidemiology at Emory University in Atlanta and one of the study authors. It’s these local clusters of vaccinations that put a specific community or school at the greatest risk, according to the study, which linked large measles outbreaks across the United States to “declining population vaccination and to voluntary abstention from measles vaccine.” But the law was not as effective in private schools, and did little to break up localized clusters of children who opted out of vaccines. ![]() ![]() What’s happened since California let fewer families reject vaccinesĪ California law that aims to limit the number of people who can refuse vaccines has led to a slight improvement in kindergartners’ vaccination rate in recent years, according to a new study in Health Affairs. “We’ll have to have evidence-based approaches to dealing with this,” Omer says. Only by actually studying the issue will we figure out how to increase vaccination rates. What we need instead, he explains, is to demand the same rigor in studying the social science side of vaccine hesitancy as we do for every other area of science. “People don’t feel entitled to talk about the microbiology of a virus without having enough experience, but anyone with an advanced degree feels entitled to talk about vaccine acceptance.” In other words, doctors and virologists shouldn't talk about vaccination efforts as if they're experts on how to persuade uncertain parents. “There’s a little bit of a Dunning-Kruger effect going on where knowing a little bit about it means we think we know a lot more than we do,” says Saad Omer, an epidemiologist and vaccinologist at Emory University who regularly serves on advisory boards for vaccine-preventable diseases. Public health officials have learned some lessons from their own efforts to increase vaccination rates, but that’s not the same thing as truly understanding what works and what doesn’t. We’re finally studying how to combat the anti-vax movement, but the methods may surprise you ĭespite anti-vax movements being nearly as old as the first vaccine, there hasn’t been much research at all on how to convince parents to vaccinate.
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