Late Vaccinations a Worrying Trend

Parents increasingly put off vaccinating their children on schedule finds a new study by the Oregon Health Authority in Portland. The group conducting the study analyzed a medical database of nearly 100,000 children born from 2003 to 2009. By 2009 ten percent of the children had not gotten their vaccinations on schedule and 30 percent had at least one of them delayed. Amanda Dempsey, a physician and researcher at the University of Colorado Denver remarked, that this trend is "very generalizable” to the rest of the country. In the guidelines of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention multiple vaccinations at the age of two, four, and six months are advised. These vaccinations protect against potentially deadly illnesses like hepatitis B, diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, meningitis, pneumonia, polio, and flu. The increasing number of routine vaccinations since 1995 and false claims linking vaccines to autism and other problems might be what motivates parents to put off the visit to the doctor's office. While the study did not assess whether delaying immunizations leads to more illness a link seems apparent. The general trend of delayed immunizations has coincided with recent outbreaks of measles and whooping cough. People who were most at risk were either unvaccinated or undervaccinated. Source: