Once Nearly Eradicated, Vaccine-Preventable Diseases Return to U.S.

Aug. 2, 2006 — -- It started as a self-sacrificing trip to Romania to perform missionary work at an orphanage.

But when a rural Indiana family returned home in 2005, the voyage ended in a horrible twist: Thirty-four people in the West Lafayette area came down with measles, a highly infectious disease brought home from Romania by the family's teenage daughter, who hadn't been vaccinated against it.

Although she wasn't feeling well, the girl attended a church function, where several unvaccinated members of the community became exposed to her germs. (Her family has asked that its name be withheld for privacy reasons.)

The family's story highlights a growing concern, according to a report published in today's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. Although vaccines are designed to protect those most vulnerable to infections -- children -- an increasing fear of vaccines could make more towns ripe for the spread of measles and other vaccine-preventable diseases, such as mumps and whooping cough, also known as pertussis.

Why do some people choose not to vaccinate their kids? In 1998, the Lancet, a British medical journal, published an article that claimed that the MMR (measles-mumps-rubella) vaccine caused autism in children. The article has since been retracted, but the worry has remained.

As a result, even though vaccines are required for school attendance, many parents have opted out, claiming that vaccination violates their personal or religious beliefs. It appears this view is especially prevalent among parents who home-school their children. And this, in turn, puts children and their communities at a growing risk of spreading preventable epidemics.

"Most parents today have never seen the physical and emotional devastation caused by vaccine-preventable diseases and have a skewed view of the perceived risks associated with vaccines versus the actual risks of the diseases the vaccines are designed to prevent," said Dr. Gary L. Freed, chairman of the U.S. National Vaccine Advisory Committee and director of the Pediatrics and Child Health Evaluation and Research unit at the University of Michigan Healthcare System.