State must stand strong on promoting vaccinations

The headline shouldn’t be surprising — but yet I still shuddered when I read it.

Two cases of measles at Yale New Haven Hospital. The news here thankfully pales in comparison to what we’re seeing in other parts of the country, like Washington state. The health department there is reporting more and more cases of measles each week. Dozens are sick, mostly in one county that has historically had an undervaccinated population. And just who is getting sick? Mostly young kids who have not been vaccinated.

Parents who choose not to vaccinate are gambling with their children’s health — and in the case of these kids in Washington, that gamble was wrong. Kids now face a disease that can be devastating — it can kill.

Connecticut has long boasted high vaccination rates, but we are now seeing an alarming erosion in those numbers. Data just released from the Department of Public Health shows that vaccine exemptions for kids in Connecticut jumped nearly 15 percent in 2016-17. Exemptions here have to be for medical or religious reasons and the new report didn’t offer insight into reasons for the spike but, nonetheless, it is worrisome.

I fear that this is just the tip of the iceberg. Because of the speed at which measles can spread, it’s the first disease we usually see come back when a population is undervaccinated. But if this “vaccine hesitancy,” as the World Health Organization calls it, continues, we will see more and more diseases that we’ve been able to combat come back into our lives. The WHO says vaccine hesitancy is one of the top 10 threats to public health in 2019.

This is why it is critical our communities stay on guard. That Connecticut lawmakers continue to enforce the strong vaccine requirements that our state has on the books and reject proposals intended to weaken our ability to ward off these diseases.

Each year in Hartford there are attempts made to chip away at the public health and weaken our vaccine laws. We can’t as a community let that happen, or we will quickly find ourselves in the situation unfolding in other parts of the country.

Lack of vaccination is how cases of diseases like measles — once thought to be almost eliminated — surge back. That’s how it gains momentum in our communities, our neighborhoods, our hospitals. It infects those close to us, including those who can’t get vaccinated, like the very young or those with compromised immune systems.

And it costs us financially. A new report out of Colorado showed that unvaccinated kids cost insurers and parents over $55 million in 2017. That’s money spent on hospital and emergency room visits that could have been avoided if kids had been immunized.

Ironically, as the word of the measles outbreak spreads, kids whose parents have opted them out of vaccination as babies are the ones now looking for help, heading online to ask how and where they can get vaccinated.

These kids are scared of contracting a disease that is easily preventable. Maybe this gives hope that the next generation will trust the science, see the sense in preventing disease, keep themselves, their children and the population at large healthy. Lives literally depend on it.