vaccination 20 years ago,” Dr. Chenven said. “Measles is not a benign disease — it’s not just a rash and a fever. It can be encephalitis, and it can be death from measles. So these are all serious, serious conditions.”
Be Wise — Immunize
Physician Resources
The TMA Foundation funds the Be Wise — ImmunizeSM
DISCREDITED SCIENCE LOOMS LARGE Although vaccination skeptics long predate the work of British physician An- drew Wakefield, MD, his now-discredited 1998 study raising the possibility of a link between the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism was the catalyst for much of today’s movement to eliminate vaccination require- ments. (See “Bad Science,” March 2011 Texas Medicine, pages 27–32, or visit
www.texmed.org/BadScience.) After publishing the findings in the British journal The Lancet, Dr. Wake-
field theorized that administering the separate vaccines for those three illnesses might be safer than the three-in-one shot. Many concerned parents in Britain and elsewhere latched on to the implications of that research. “I think that movement, at the very base, is not data-driven,” Dr. Kumar said of
initiative,
which strives to improve vaccination rates in Texas through education and hands-on clinics. Be Wise helps educate physicians, ofice staff, and patients about vaccinations. It offers patient education materials and physician toolkits for children and adolescents to help doc- tors talk to parents about fears of and objections to vaccination. Learn more about Be
Wise, and find links to download the education- al materials and physician toolkits at www.texmed .org/bewise.
the vaccination skepticism. “It’s not scientifically sound. It’s based on anecdote and fear. Medicine is not based on that; medicine is data-driven.” The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) maintains a list of vaccination-
related studies on its website at
www2.aap.org/immunization/families/faq/vac cinestudies.pdf. The studies AAP links to in the documents find vaccines to be safe and effective and don’t support the research suggesting links to autism. For example, a 2002 study that appeared in the New England Journal of Medi-
cine looked at all children born in Denmark between 1991 and 1998. Researchers obtained vaccination data on each infant from the Danish National Board of Health and got data on each child’s autism status from the country’s Psychiatric Central Register. The study accounted for 537,303 children, 82 percent of whom had received
the MMR vaccine. Out of those children, the study identified 316 children with autism and 422 others diagnosed with autistic spectrum disorders. Researchers concluded that the results provided “strong evidence against the hypothesis that MMR vaccination causes autism.”
EXEMPTION BOOM IN TEXAS A recent University of Michigan poll suggests more parents are becoming firm- er supporters of vaccinations. The poll, which researchers conducted in May, measured changes in parents’ attitudes toward vaccination between 2014 and 2015. About one-third of respondents, 34 percent, said they now perceived more benefits to vaccines than they had before, and 35 percent also said they were more supportive of vaccination requirements for school and day care entry. One quarter of parents said they perceived vaccines to be safer than they did a year earlier. A majority of parents said they had the same views as a year ago on vac- cines’ effectiveness and safety. Still, skeptics worried about potential harmful effects of vaccinations con-
tinue to fight against efforts to implement stricter laws and policies, often using social media to reach new eyes. Not even an event as far-reaching as the Disney- land outbreak will change some minds. On the same day ARC announced its new vaccination policy, California Gov. Jerry Brown signed a controversial bill that barred exemptions from school-required vaccinations based on religious and personal beliefs. Governor Brown approved Senate Bill 277 over loud protests from groups opposing mandatory vaccinations for public schoolchildren, who said they would challenge the law in court, according to reports. Cook Children’s Health Care System, in which Dr. Terk practices, has re- quired its pediatric patients to receive vaccinations for about six years. Pediatri-
28 TEXAS MEDICINE September 2015
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