Vaccination numbers up despite fears

Despite a suggested link between immunizations and autism, Idaho’s parents are vaccinating their children in record numbers.

Eighty-five percent of 2-year-olds in the five northern counties are up-to-date on a series of 15 vaccinations that prevent such maladies as measles, mumps, diphtheria, polio and whooping cough, said Mariva Kammeyer, Panhandle Health District immunization coordinator.

The statewide immunization rate has climbed from a miserable 61 percent in 1993 to 78 percent in 2003, the last year for which complete statistics are available, said Andy Noble, an educator for the state Health and Welfare’s immunization program in Boise. Idaho’s immunization rate is now one percentage point below the national average.

The growing popularity of vaccinations pleases health care workers who have hammered parents with a non-stop message of disease prevention for the last decade.

“The reason disease is rare is because of vaccinations,” said Ross Mason, Health and Welfare spokesman in Boise. “It’s been the primary mission of pediatricians, and it’s gradually helped eliminate or knock down nasty diseases.”

Health and Welfare will continue to pound out the message next week by sponsoring visits to Boise, Pocatello and Coeur d’Alene by Dr. Gary S. Marshall, a practicing pediatrician and professor of pediatrics at the University of Louisville School of Medicine. Marshall wrote “The Vaccine Handbook: A Practical Guide for Clinicians” and is known as a top expert on immunizations, Mason said.

Marshall will meet with health care workers and address recent concerns that autism is linked to the immunization against measles, mumps and rubella. The study that showed a link was invalid because the group tested was skewed, Noble said. A Danish study of 300,000 children showed no connection, he said.

The possible autism/immunization link is only one of many concerns immunization opponents have, said Ingri Cassel, founder of Vaccination Liberation, an opposition group in Spirit Lake with more than 70 members. Cassel believes the apparent rising confidence in immunizations is due to selective information that downplays the risks.

“We encourage people to research, ask the right questions,” she said. “Do you know what’s in the injection? Do you know what it does? Is it pumping carcinogens directly into the lymphatic system?”

People from VacLib, the group’s nickname, peppered author Laurie Garrett with questions on the value of vaccines during her talk at North Idaho College on Tuesday. Garrett is a Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer who has extensively researched the path of infectious diseases around the world. She documented the return of diphtheria and other diseases to the former Soviet Union countries after communism’s end also ended forced and regular immunizations.

VacLib’s intent at Garrett’s talk was to raise questions in the audience’s minds, Cassel said. Her group passed out cards bearing its phone number and Web address so people have access to the library of immunization-opposition research VacLib has collected.

Randi Lustig, Panhandle Health District’s manager of epidemiology services, said the large number of people who are immunized is the reason some people can refuse immunization and stay healthy.

“It’s herd immunity,” she said. “Any disease needs a certain amount of vulnerable population to establish itself and be communicated from one person to another. If enough people are immune, it can’t be established.”

Immunizations eradicated smallpox and polio in the United States, according to the Centers on Disease Control and Prevention. A single case each of diphtheria and congenital rubella showed up in 2002. Even measles, a former childhood rite of passage, was down to 44 cases nationwide in 2002.

Drop immunizations and any of those diseases easily could return, Lustig said, particularly in this age when people from everywhere in the world land at U.S. airports daily. Then the small risk associated with immunizations takes on a different perspective, she said.

“If there is smallpox in the community and you’re looking at three in one million dying from effects of the vaccine, you run the risk,” she said, quoting an example Garrett used in her talk. “It’s hard to understand risk in an environment that has held these terrible diseases in suppression for so long.”