Childhood Vaccination Gaps Are Narrowing
March 1st, 2010 by kerri
About three-quarters of U.S. children received all of the recommended vaccinations in 2008, up from about half in 2000, reports a new study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
“The goal of the study was to look at trends in vaccination disparities over the last nine years to see if the differences between demographic groups are increasing or decreasing. For most of the categorizations of demographics, the disparities had gone down over the last nine years, so it’s a very positive finding,” says Elizabeth Luman, Ph.D., a researcher in the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the CDC. The study appeared online in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
Luman and CDC colleague Zhen Zhao used 2000-to-2008 phone-survey data from parents of 167,086 U.S. children between the ages of 19 months and 35 months. In addition to race, ethnicity, poverty status and participation in national vaccine programs, parents reported whether their children received the series of shots that protects children against diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, poliovirus, measles, mumps, rubella, hepatitis B, Haemophilus influenzae type B, and varicella (chickenpox).
“Vaccination coverage in all groups has increased substantially over the last few years,” Luman says. For example, coverage rose from 47.1 percent among children who received care from public providers in 2000 to 71.8 percent in 2008. As of 2008, differences in vaccination coverage rates between socio-demographic groups were “generally small,” the authors note.
“Most of the disparities were smaller, but especially racial disparities were reduced to levels below statistical significance. Disparities between those living in suburban and rural areas narrowed by about 4 percent. That’s good news,” Luman says. “What we’d like to see is for all children to have equally high access to these life-saving vaccines.”
The use of physician records to verify parent reports of vaccination coverage strengthened the authors’ findings, says Bevin Cohen, an infectious-disease researcher and project coordinator at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research to Reduce Antimicrobial Resistance at Columbia University School of Nursing. She had no affiliation with the study.
One of the reasons rates went up across the board, especially for rural areas, is the existence of programs that allow people to get regular coverage, Cohen says. “Improvements in programs such as the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) and Medicaid will continue to boost these rates more than anything else.”