CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, JULY 22, 2014, OR THEREAFTER
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, JULY 22, 2014, OR THEREAFTER
BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
"IS VACCINATION ORDER LINKED TO PERTUSSIS EPIDEMIC?”
For almost seven months, California
parents have been free to claim without offering any proof that their religion
forbids getting their children vaccinated against once dreaded and disabling
diseases like polio, mumps, pertussis and smallpox.
This allows parents who believe false
myths to exempt their children from the vaccinations usually required for
public school enrollment, even if they really have no religious beliefs at all.
Is it just coincidence that first six
months of this new “personal belief” rule saw cases of pertussis, also known as
whooping cough, more than double from last year? Through mid-June, 4,558 cases
had been reported in the state, fully 1,100 during a single two-week period in
June. There were three deaths in this year’s first six months.
The
state’s officially-declared whooping cough epidemic is now on pace to top even
2010, when California recorded 9,120 cases, 809 hospitalizations and 10 deaths
from the ailment. That year saw the most cases in more than 60 years, since
record-keeping began.
Officials
are reluctant to tie the new epidemic to a once-unpublicized 2012 signing
message from Gov. Jerry Brown, attached to his approval of a bill originally
designed to make it more difficult for parents to evade vaccinating their kids.
Brown's words now allow parents merely
to check off a box on a form, rather than having a doctor, school nurse or
nurse practitioner sign a paper attesting that they have been informed of the
benefits of vaccinations, as was previously needed for an exemption.
From the time his message became reality
late last year, Brown has appeared oblivious to its the potential harm, his
press secretary saying earlier this year that he “believes that vaccinations
are profoundly important and a major public health benefit.” He has said
nothing beyond stating that his order aimed only to “take into account First
Amendment religious freedoms through an extremely narrow exemption.”
But the exemption turns out to be wide
enough, as the football cliché goes, to drive a truck through.
So far, no one is directly blaming the
Brown message for the epidemic of whooping cough, whose symptoms include “rapid
coughing spells that end with a tell-tale ‘whooping’ sound,” according to a
state Public Health department description.
“Pertussis is just cyclical,” the
department’s deputy director and chief epidemiologist, Dr. Gil Chavez, said
during a conference call. “The biggest contributor now is that the most modern
vaccine’s effects wane over time, with the fullest protection lasting just two
to three years.”
In fact, current pertussis vaccines
given children under nine have shorter-term effects than those used in prior
generations. “The vaccine is now easier on children, producing less fevers and
less arm soreness than previous ones,” said Catherine Flores Martin, executive
director of the California Immunization Coalition. The tradeoff is shorter
duration.
Martin added that only after school
opens this fall and officials report how many personal belief exemptions are
filed will there be certainty about some effects of the Brown message. But she
agreed that the confluence of the new form and the record number of cases,
coming more rapidly than ever, might be linked.
“Politicians have a responsibility to
protect the public and they don’t when they issue an order like this one,” she
said.
The health department reported rates
of pertussis cases this year are highest in Marin and Sonoma counties. “It
boils down to the number of susceptible individuals in those counties,” said
Chavez.
But Martin said, “It’s worth noting that
those two counties also are the ones with the highest rates of parental
refusals to allow their children to be vaccinated.”
That’s in line with a Johns Hopkins
University study which concluded last year that California’s 2010 pertussis
epidemic was fueled in part by an increase in the numbers of parents refusing
to vaccinate children. The study showed the locations with the highest disease
rates were also those with the most personal belief exemptions.
And that was before Brown’s order
produced the new, easier to employ form in use this year. Still, it will be a
few months before anyone can definitely establish cause and effect between the
form and the newest outbreak.
-30-
Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His
book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and
the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover
fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net
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