EDINBURGH, Scotland, April 25 (UPI) -- Vulnerability to measles infection has risen sharply among nursery-school children in Scotland since 1998, despite recent increases in vaccine compliance.
There are now 25 postal-code districts where more than one in five nursery-school children is potentially at risk of catching measles, compared with just three in 1998, when some stopped giving their children vaccine fearing it might be linked to autism, according to study author Dr. Claire Cameron, an epidemiologist with Health Protection Scotland.
The measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, known as the MMR, was introduced in Britain in 1988 and it recommended a first dose be given to a child at 13 months, with the second dose between 3 years and 5 years of age. By 1998, 95 percent of Scottish children had been vaccinated.
Researchers charted the number of children that had been given the vaccine from 1987 to 2004 and found the sharpest decline began for children in 1999, according to the study published in the Archives of Disease in Childhood.
Cameron also found the most affluent sectors of the population tended to either have their children vaccinated early or not at all, but parents in the poorer parts of Scotland tended to delay vaccinating their children, the British Medical Journal reported.
