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Parents against vaccines found to stick together

The Columbian
Published: January 19, 2015, 4:00pm

More parents are leery about vaccinating their children, even against once-common diseases like measles and whooping cough. New research suggests their beliefs are contagious too.

A groundbreaking study of 154,424 children covered by Kaiser Permanente in Northern California found five geographic clusters where children were significantly more likely to be underimmunized by their third birthday, including almost one in four toddlers in part of Vallejo, a city in the San Francisco Bay area. The approach may help doctors identify communities where parents are the most concerned and the chance of an outbreak is highest, the researchers said.

The findings published in Pediatrics confirm long-held speculation that opposition to immunizations can concentrate in communities, increasing the risk of outbreaks, said lead author Tracy Lieu, a pediatrician and director of the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research. They also bolster earlier findings that the number of children who aren’t getting the recommended vaccines, or receiving them on time, is on the rise.

“While complete refusal of all vaccines is quite rare, we know parental concern about vaccination has increased in the past decade,” she said. “We need to learn a lot more about what are the effective ways of communicating with parents.”

While the poor have long had lower rates of vaccinations because of their costs, the ranks of children who haven’t had their shots have been climbing in other categories because of fears that immunizations may hurt developing bodies and even lead to autism — concerns that have been debunked in numerous studies.

The findings published in Pediatrics are timely, coming amid an outbreak of measles in children and young adults who visited Disneyland and Disney California Adventure Park last month. Of 28 people who were infected, just three were fully vaccinated, the state’s Department of Public Health said in an email on Jan. 15.

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