A new study identifies Jackson County, the second most populous county in Missouri, as a hot spot for a potential outbreak of measles, whooping cough and other vaccine-preventable diseases.
The Kansas City area already experienced measles outbreaks in March and April that sickened 35 people — 22 of whom were in Kansas, and the rest in Missouri, The Associated Press reported. The ages of those sickened were not made public. They were the first measles cases reported in Missouri in recent years.
Missouri is one of 18 states that allow parents to obtain exemptions to school immunization requirements based on their religious and philosophical beliefs. Missouri permits these nonmedical exemptions for child care facilities, but not public schools.
People are also reading…
A team of researchers from Texas universities analyzed data from those states since 2009 and found that 12 of the 18 states — including Missouri — had increasing numbers of kindergartners enrolling without having been vaccinated. The study was published this week in PLOS Medicine.
Looking at county data, researchers listed 10 counties with the highest percentage of exempted children. Those percentages ranged from 14.6 percent in Morgan County, Utah, to 26.7 percent in Camas County, Idaho. Generally, the counties had fewer than 50,000 people and were in rural regions of their states.
Researchers also looked at urban areas with more than 400 exempted children in the 2015-2016 school year and found Jackson County — with 412 — among a list of 15 hot spots.
Jackson County is one of 114 counties in Missouri and includes most of Kansas City and 17 other cities and towns. The total population is 654,000.
“The high numbers of (nonmedical exemptions) in these densely populated urban centers suggest that outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases could either originate from or spread rapidly throughout these populations of unimmunized, unprotected children,” the researchers wrote. “The fact that the largest count of vaccine-exempt pediatric populations originate in large cities with busy international airports may further contribute to this risk.”
Immunizing children also helps protect the health of those who cannot be immunized because they are too young or because of certain medical conditions such as cancer.