SAN DIEGO — Measles continues to sweep California, seeping into six other states and Mexico after an outbreak began mid-December at Disneyland, re-igniting controversy over parents under-vaccinating their children.
“Statewide, 2.54 percent of children have a personal belief exemption on file, but 6.86 percent of kindergarteners enter school under-vaccinated,” according to the California Report.
A school counselor in San Diego told Breitbart California that often, in the past, she has seen parents sign the vaccination waiver for reasons other than personal belief. For example, parents would often take the option when they could not make the time to get a children vaccination by a given school deadline.
Parents continue to express concern over potentially severe adverse effects following immunizing their children. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention documents various possible side-effects of the measles vaccine, including effects “so rare that it is hard to tell whether they are caused by the vaccine,” such as deafness, long-term seizures, and permanent brain damage.
Controversy continues over an alleged connection to autism that has been refuted by medical research.
As of Monday, 108 cases of the disease have been reported through the California Department of Public Health, with 92 of those confirmed within California. 16 cases connected to the Disneyland outbreak were reported outside of California, until the state stopped tracking cases outside the state last week.
A recently released study of electronic medical records in northern California showed under-vaccination particularly prevalent among graduate-level-educated families, as well as in low-income communities.
President Obama chimed in on the issue in an interview aired on NBC Monday, saying, “We’ve looked at this again and again. There is every reason to get vaccinated, but there aren’t reasons to not.”
Measles is a highly contagious disease that can remain active for two hours following the cough or sneeze of an infected person in which contaminated droplets enter the air and land on surrounding surfaces.
Public health officials declared measles eliminated from the United States in the year 2000.
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