An excellent post by my colleague Ross Silverman, cross-posted from Bill of Health
By: Ross D. Silverman, JD, MPH (Twitter: @phlu)
Fairbanks School of Public Health and McKinney School of Law, Indiana University, Indianapolis.
This has been a big year for outbreaks of Vaccine-Preventable Illnesses (VPIs) in the United States. While we are only halfway through 2014, there have been more measles cases this year than we have seen since before 2000, when the Federal government officially declared the United States “measles free” (in other words: there are no more domestically-generated measles cases; all of our outbreaks are imported). We’ve also seen large mumps and whooping cough outbreaks. You can follow all the disease outbreak action, both here and worldwide, via the Council on Foreign Relations’ very cool interactive map.
States use their police power authority under the Constitution to try to minimize our risk of exposure to VPIs. First, every state requires that children demonstrate proof of immunization against many VPIs as a condition of entry into schools, preschools and day cares. States also permit exemptions to these laws – every state allows a child who may be medically susceptible to injury from vaccines to receive an exemption (with proper documentation of vulnerability), and most states allow parents to apply for an exemption based on either religious or broader philosophical grounds. A combination of factors, including: a nearly two decade trend of increasing numbers of families obtaining exemptions and clustering in particular communities (or avoiding vaccine requirements by taking advantage of law loopholes, such as if a state’s vaccine law does not cover private schools); waning effectiveness of vaccination protections over time (as has been seen with whooping cough); increased international travel facilitating ready reimportation of VPIs from abroad; and many more immunocompromised individuals living in our communities; have slightly weakened our overall protection against VPI outbreaks.