Chasing Life

 

Chasing Life

 

One of the biggest public health setbacks from the Covid-19 pandemic has been the drop in routine childhood vaccination, including against measles. A new study found that vaccination rates for the disease dropped throughout the pandemic and hit the lowest coverage rate in more than a decade.   Although global measles vaccinations mostly improved from 2000 to 2021, with coverage of the first dose of the vaccines increasing from 72% in 2000 to 86% in 2019, rates fell from 83% in 2020 to 81% in 2021.   Over that same time period, measles vaccination prevented an estimated 56 million deaths worldwide.   Measles was declared eliminated in the US in 2000, but in 2019, there were almost 1,300 cases reported in the country, the highest number since 1992. Most recently, an outbreak in Ohio has sickened over two dozen children across 12 day cares and schools, nearly all of them unvaccinated.   This fall, the US joined a list of 30 other countries with circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus. A case of paralytic polio had been detected in an unvaccinated adult in Rockland County, New York, and samples of wastewater from communities nearby tested positive for the virus.   Circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus occurs when local immunity is low enough to allow transmission of the original weakened virus that is used in the polio vaccine. As the virus circulates and genetic mutations occur, it can regain the ability to infect the central nervous system and cause paralysis.   However, virus transmission does not happen from US vaccinations against the disease. Unlike some other countries, the US has not used the oral polio vaccine that uses a weakened form of the virus since 2000.   In London, where the virus was also found in wastewater samples, the UK Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation enacted a polio vaccine booster dose campaign for all children between the ages of 1 and 9.   The pandemic has no doubt  been difficult for everyone, but we shouldn’t let that public health crisis create a new one. Just as with Covid, we are all in this together and can do our part to prevent these diseases by making sure that we and our children are up to date on all of our vaccines.