Slide shown by state epidemiologist at Immunization Summit shows Kentucky's rate of vaccination against childhood diseases is lower than all bordering states. (For a larger version, click on it.) |
Kentucky Health News
The Immunize Kentucky Coalition's Immunization Summit, held May 10 in Lexington, opened with a warning that Kentucky's children fell behind on their immunizations during the pandemic and still haven't caught up.
State Epidemiologist Kathleen Winter (Photos by Melissa Patrick) |
Citing 2021-22 school immunization data, State Epidemiologist Kathleen Winter said Kentucky is behind all its bordering states in routine childhood vaccination rates and is well below the national average.
The greatest concern right now is kindergartners, she said, because their measles-mumps-rubella vaccination rate has dropped in the last two school years. (MMR rates among seventh and 11th-graders remained about the same, but that's no surprise, since two doses of the vaccine are recommended before a child turns 6.)
"We really need to focus on this particular age group that maybe has missed vaccines . . . because of the pandemic," Winter said.
Winter said Kentucky's kindergarten two-dose MMR rate of 86.5% ranks in the bottom five states nationally. The national rate is 93.5%. The National Immunization Survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which runs behind school data, shows that Kentucky's decline in immunization is similar to a national decline.
Regular well-child visits help parents and health-care providers keep children current on immunizations. Winter said one study found that 41% of Kentucky parents of children 12 and younger reported their child had missed a well-child visit during the pandemic. This rate was even higher among Hispanics (48%).
"We're getting back on track with routine visits now, but we still have not caught up for where we had this big decline during the pandemic months," Winter said.
Winter said there are "dramatic differences" in immunization rates between those who have private health insurance, publicly paid insurance, and those who are uninsured.
"There's some real work to be done with these vulnerable populations, not just here in Kentucky, but nationwide," Winter said.
"We have to routinize it in every way possible, routinize it for our conversations with parents and for routine childhood visits, getting it incorporated fully into the childhood schedule," she said.
"This is why we need to work now to get this routinized as much as we can into clinics and settings where people are routinely getting vaccinated," she said.
Winter said the measles exposure that thousands of people had in February at the spontaneous revival at Asbury University in Wilmore turned out to be a public-health success story.
An unvaccinated Jessamine County resident who attended the revival in Februrary had Kentucky's third reported case of measles in three months, but Winter said there has not been one secondary measles case from that exposure. She noted that the person with measles wore a surgical-type mask at "a lot" of the events."The reality is, most people are immune to measles," Winter said. "Most people are fully vaccinated or had measles as a child. So we do not have this crisis of a population-level issue. What we have are targeted individuals and ages where we need to get back on track. So, this is where we need to focus."
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Even with this public-health victory, Winter cautioned that without a high level of population immunity, the potential for a super-spreading event would remain.
Organizers of the summit hope it will be an annual event. Amber Malott, chair of the Immunize Kentucky Coalition, which is part of the Kentucky Rural Health Association, said its mission is to "create equitable access to vaccinations across the commonwealth." As part of that mission, she said they will hold free pediatric immunization symposiums in Morehead June 20 and Owensboro June 29.
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