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A study led by a vaccine research team at Kaiser Permanente Colorado’s Institute for Health Research in Denver showed that kids whose parents refuse the pertussis vaccination are much more likely to come down with whooping cough than kids who are immunized against the disease.
These days an increasing number parents are concerned about the risks associated with certain vaccines, and the pertussis vaccine is one of those. At this time there is no proven relationship between the pertussis vaccine and the onset of autism, but I’m sure the possibility is still frightening to some, and of course parents refusing the vaccine may have had the hope that if everyone else was vaccinated then the disease would not be a problem. Whooping cough is highly contageous, and it can be very serious or even fatal in young children and infants.
The study looked at data on children enrolled in the Kaiser Permanente of Colorado health plan between 1996 and 2007 and looked at cases of whooping cough vs. 4 randomly selected controls per case. Whooping cough status and vaccination status were determined from medical records. It was found that there were 12% vaccine refusers among the pertussis cases and 0.5% among the controls. Also, 11% of all the whooping cough cases in the pediatric population there were due to parents refusing to let their children be vaccinated against pertussis. The study authors concluded that “Children of parents who refuse whooping cough immunizations are at high risk for pertussis infection relative to vaccinated children. Herd immunity does not seem to completely protect unvaccinated children from pertussis. These findings stress the need to further understand why parents refuse immunizations and to develop strategies for conveying the risks and benefits of immunizations to parents more effectively.
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Reference: PEDIATRICS Vol. 123 No. 6 June 2009, pp. 1446-1451 (doi:10.1542/peds.2008-2150)