Lawmakers warned state at risk for outbreaks

Connecticut lawmakers should not become complacent with the state’s high vaccination rate, public health experts said Monday, warning that clusters of unvaccinated students identified in recent Department of Public Health data pose a public health risk for the entire state.

Linda Niccolai, an epidemiology professor at Yale School of Medicine, said Connecticut “right now is really at risk for outbreaks” given the state data show about 100 schools have vaccination rates below federally recommended guidelines of 95 percent for measles, mumps and rubella. Connecticut’s statewide immunization rate is 96.5 percent. The data also show greater than 5 percent of the students in more than 50 schools have religious exemptions from vaccines, a figure that has been climbing in the state.

“These are communities where the overall coverage is so low, it’s low enough that diseases can come in, can get populated, established, cause outbreaks and spread,” she said. “So even though we have high overall coverage, what this report highlighted is pockets, clusters of unvaccinated kids where it’s only a matter of time for one measles infection to come into these communities and then you have an outbreak, and then it spreads beyond that cluster to other people.”

Niccolai was among a group of speakers invited to an informational legislative hearing on Connecticut’s religious exemption, which state legislators are considering eliminating in the wake of an uptick in measles cases across the country. The experts stressed Monday that vaccines save lives and are overwhelmingly safe.

There have been three confirmed cases in Connecticut so far this year. One case has been tied to New York, where medical organizations and county health officials have called for eliminating that state’s religious exemptions for vaccines. Most of the nation’s 764 reported cases of measles, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, have been in New York.