Gambling with Children's Health

Suppose you were asked for a list of the game-changers in modern medicine — treatments that saved the most lives and had the greatest health impact.

You might name organ transplants or drugs to fight cancer and AIDS. Maybe if you knew someone with heart disease, you'd think about angioplasty and stents.

Vaccines probably wouldn't make your list. They should.

Since the English physician Edward Jenner created the first crude smallpox vaccine in 1796, millions of lives have been saved — and many, many serious complications have been averted — by immunizations.

But a growing number of parents in Missouri and Illinois are opting out of routine vaccinations for their children, as Valerie Schremp Hahn reported in Friday's Post-Dispatch.

That unfortunate trend puts children, and the communities they live in, at risk.

Some parents opt not to have their children vaccinated because of fears — now long discredited — about a link between the preservative thimerosal and autism.

A number of large, well-controlled studies conducted around the world have found no evidence of harm caused by thimerosal in vaccines. Ironically, with the exception of trace amounts in some flu vaccines, thimerosal hasn't been used in childhood vaccines in the United States since 1999.

Other parents express concern about the vanishingly rare chance of a child developing serious complications after immunization, or they voice philosophical objections to government immunization requirements for school-age kids.

The immunization requirements are driven by the very real harm that vaccine-preventable diseases can do. In the 1920s, before a vaccine was available, about 17,500 kids died every year in the United States from diphtheria.

About 150,000 contracted pertussis — whooping cough — another potentially fatal childhood illness.

Those illnesses are rare today, but they still occur — especially in children who haven't been immunized against them. A 2005 whooping cough outbreak sickened almost 26,000 people. In 2006, the United States experienced its largest mumps outbreak in more than 20 years.

The good news is that, even with some parents opting out, the overall vaccination rates in Missouri and Illinois and around the country remain high.

But immunization rates for some dangerous diseases are very low.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that just 21 percent of school-age children received seasonal flu shots (which are recommended, but not required) last year. That's much lower than the 41 percent of infants and 67 percent of the elderly who got the shots.

Seasonal flu kills about 36,000 Americans every year — more than the total number of homicide and AIDS deaths combined.

The risk of contracting seasonal flu is highest among the very young and the very old. The H1N1 strain of influenza strikes school-age kids, yet 40 percent of parents recently surveyed by the University of Michigan said they would not get their school-age children vaccinated for H1N1 influenza, better known as swine flu.

Many said they were concerned about the new vaccine's safety. But it's made the same way seasonal flu vaccines are — and have been for years. Some fearful parents, and at least one public health official in Tennessee, cited rumors and unpublished reports circulating on the Internet.

Fears and ignorance can have deadly consequences. The CDC reported Friday that 76 children have died of H1N1 influenza so far this year, including 19 in the past week.

Flu season is still a month away. There's still time to act.

REPRINTED FROM THE ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH.

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