Inquirer Editorial: Schoolchildren still need to take their shots

Parents who think they're doing schoolchildren a favor by not getting them immunized against childhood diseases need to think again. They put not only the health of their own children at risk, but also the health of their friends and classmates.

Yet new studies show a growing trend in some areas of the country to either forgo childhood immunizations or to delay the shots until parents think their children are old enough to tolerate a potential negative reaction.

An Associated Press analysis coordinated with the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found one out of 20 kindergartners in eight states did not take all of the vaccinations to required attend school. More than half of all states saw increases in the number of children receiving immunization exemptions.

Meanwhile, a separate study published in a recent edition of the journal Pediatrics found that more than one in 10 parents in the United States deviates from recommended schedules to have children immunized. About 2 percent of parents in that study refused all recommended vaccines.

Parents need to heed the warning of the American Academy of Pediatrics that the longer they delay immunizations, the greater the risk to their child. Just last month, this country experienced its largest outbreak of measles in 15 years - 214 cases. An outbreak of whooping cough, 121 cases, recently developed outside Chicago in McHenry County, Ill.

Some parents apparently are still motivated by a 1998 study that linked the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine to autism. But a British doctor, Andrew Wakefield, lost his medical license last year after investigations showed he falsified data in the study.

The AP analysis identified most parents who apply to their local school districts for immunization exemptions as "middle-class, college-eduated white people." The parents don't believe mass inoculations are the reason that most childhood diseases are in decline.

Actually, it is the success of mass immunization in the United States that has made these parents so bold as to disdain them. Many of these adults simply aren't old enough to have memories of what it was like when an outbreak of polio could cripple or kill children throughout a community.

A return to those days is remote, but not impossible. the CDC's Lance Rodewald says China was free of polio for two decades, but just this year saw cases develop. The risks are too great. Children should be inoculated at the earliest ages recommended by pediatricians.