Doctors: Vaccine fears sparking outbreaks

ASHLAND, Ore., May 7 (UPI) -- U.S. parents concerned with the potential side effects of childhood vaccinations may be responsible for outbreaks of largely eradicated diseases, doctors say.

Doctors said in a new research study parental concerns regarding childhood vaccinations may be triggering outbreaks of diseases such as measles and whooping cough, The Wall Street Journal said Thursday.

Dr. Saad Omer, lead author of the report, said parents should consider the community risks associated with avoiding childhood vaccinations.

"People need to recognize that in the case of infectious diseases, what other people do impacts (their children)," the researcher from Atlanta's Emory University said. "If they live in a community that has a cluster of refusers, their risk of getting a vaccine-preventable disease goes up, just by virtue of who they play with."

Figures from the nearly 20 states that allow vaccination exemptions based on personal beliefs show the exemption rate increased to 2.8 percent last year.

Lance Rodewald, director of the Center for Disease Control's immunization services division, agreed such exemption clusters could cause potential disease outbreaks.

"Overall coverage is quite high, but that doesn't mean it's uniformly high, and it's the clustering of exemptors that we get quite concerned about," Rodewald told the Journal.