Action needed to protect against disease outbreak

Let’s see if our state lawmakers can understand this simple math problem. Subtract 6% or more from 100% and what do you get?

A population that’s more vulnerable to an outbreak of vaccine-preventable disease is what you get.

And peril for babies, for pregnant women, and for people whose immune systems are compromised by illnesses such as cancer.

Because in Pennsylvania immunization exemptions are handed out as if they were lollipops, parents are seeking exemptions for their schoolchildren at alarming rates. In Lancaster County, for example, nearly 1 in 10 students has been exempted from some or all vaccinations.

And that is lowering our defenses against diseases for which science and medicine decades ago provided the answer: safe, reliable vaccines.

This is deeply frustrating to physicians such as Shakthi Kumar, of Lancaster Pediatric Associates, who wrote in the March 10 Sunday LNP that it is distressing “to be distracted from new battles because we are still fighting old ones.”

Dr. Kumar wrote that she trained in India and has seen “the devastation caused by infections such as diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, polio, measles, mumps, rubella and meningitis.”

Yet in the United States, parents — sucked into the dangerous campaign of misinformation and quackery that is the anti-vaccination movement — blithely dismiss the danger of diseases such as measles, which can result in brain swelling, pneumonia, blindness and death.

Those possible outcomes were noted in an op-ed written in last week’s Sunday LNP by Dr. Joseph Kontra, chief of infectious diseases and director of infection prevention at Penn Medicine Lancaster General Health.

Here’s the reality of measles: “Measles is the most contagious infection on Earth,” Kontra wrote. “It is so contagious that a full 90% of nonimmune persons, even when exposed briefly to a measles patient, will become infected . ... In the decade prior to the 1963 availability of the vaccine, an estimated 4 million people in the U.S. got measles each year. Out of the 549,000 average annual reported cases, there were 48,000 hospitalizations, 1,000 cases of brain swelling resulting in chronic disability, and 495 deaths.”

Declared to have been eliminated in the United States in 2000, measles is returning with a vengeance. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the number of measles cases in the United States has reached its highest level in more than 25 years, with 1,001 cases in 26 states — including Pennsylvania — reported through Wednesday.

That owes significantly to the anti-vaccination movement.

To obtain a philosophical or religious exemption, all a parent needs to do is to sign a piece of paper, which offers only a single line for the parent’s explanation. That’s it.

According to data from the Pennsylvania Department of Health for the 2017-18 school year (the latest available), public schools in Lancaster County had an average exemption rate of 4%.

But private and charter schools had an average exemption rate of 12%.

And schools too small to be included in the state report had an astonishing average exemption rate of 45%.

“For the 2017-18 school year, 44 religious exemptions were claimed at private and charter schools in the county,” LNP reported. “Of that total, 20 were for a group of 47 kindergartners at Susquehanna Waldorf School in Marietta.”

As reported, four years of reports show an average exemption rate of 19% for kindergartners at Ephrata Mennonite School.

Joshua Good, administrator of Ephrata Mennonite School, said this: “I feel that parents should be empowered to make the decisions that they feel are best for their children.”

What about other people’s children? What about the infant too young to be immunized?

Or the parent undergoing chemotherapy and susceptible to illness?

Where has our sense of collective responsibility gone?

And why aren’t lawmakers acting to eliminate personal-belief exemptions?

Lawmakers in other states are working to eliminate personal-belief exemptions because they pose a clear and present danger to public health. It’s well past time for lawmakers to act here, too. — LNP, The Associated Press