Back-to-school: Immunization and check up requirements
Posted: Wednesday, August 10, 2011 6:00 am | Updated: 7:16 am, Wed Aug 10, 2011.
Parents, this year your child’s back-to-school list includes more than pencils, notebooks and glue sticks. Add new vaccines.
The Pennsylvania Department of Health in May released its changes to school immunization requirements effective Aug. 1.
The changes were made to update school vaccine requirements so they more closely match the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommendations and the advisory committee on immunization practices.
The changes include additional vaccine doses required for incoming seventh-graders or students who are 12 years old.
Seventh-graders have to get one dose each of meningococcal vaccine and Tdap vaccine, which covers tetanus, diphtheria and acellular pertussis, if five years have elapsed since the last tetanus shot.
Those new vaccines are in addition to the regular vaccine requirements for Pennsylvania students. This year they include a second dose of chicken pox vaccine for children who have not had the disease.
Visiting foreign students also are required to get at least one dose of each required vaccine or they will be placed on provisional status, meaning they can be excluded from school if their vaccines are not updated within a specific time frame.
Pennsylvania students who have at least one dose of vaccine for diphtheria, measles-mumps-rubella, hepatitis B, polio, and chicken pox also are allowed to begin the school year on a provisional status, which allows the parents eight months to update all required vaccinations, according to the state Department of Health.
Pennsylvania, like most states, allows parents to opt out of the vaccine requirements on religious or medical grounds. But, if a communicable disease outbreak occurs, an unvaccinated child will be removed from school until he or she is cleared by a doctor or the contagious period has elapsed.
Bucks and Montgomery county public and private schools generally have high vaccination rates in kindergarten and seventh-grade, according to state health department statistics.
For the 2010-11 school year, vaccination rates among 7,191 Bucks County kindergarteners ranged from a high of 94 percent who had three or more polio immunizations to 80 percent who had two doses of the chicken pox vaccine.
Among Bucks’ 8,232 seventh-graders, the vaccination rates were even higher. Ninety-nine percent had all required polio doses, 62 percent had two doses of chicken pox vaccine and 53 percent had one Tdap dose.
Montgomery County had immunization rates ranging from 97 percent of 10,293 kindergarteners who had all required polio vaccines to a low of 79 percent who had two doses of chicken pox vaccine.
Among Montgomery County’s 10,508 seventh-graders, immunization rates ranged from 98 percent of students who had all required doses of polio, hepatitis B and MMR to a low of 60 percent who had one dose of meningococcal.
Both Bucks and Montgomery had less than a half-percent of students who had obtained religious exemptions and less than 2 percent who obtained religious exemptions in kindergarten or seventh grade.
To date, no credible scientific evidence has clearly connected vaccines with developmental disorders, most notably autism and ADHD. The Institute of Medicine concluded that 19 major studies tracking thousands of children all show no link between vaccines and autism.
Vaccines not only prevent disease in people who receive them, but also protect those who come in contact with unvaccinated individuals and those whose original vaccines have lost protective ability.
Herd immunity in the general population is compromised, though, when immunization levels fall below 80 percent.
Bucks County Health Department Director Dr. David Damsker pointed out that a serious outbreak of a vaccine-preventable disease could keep unvaccinated students out of school for several weeks, potentially months during a big outbreak.
“We cannot get complacent, as life-threatening diseases like measles are still around, and nationally there is a large increase in the number of cases,” Damsker added. “In other countries where immunization levels are dropping, vaccine preventable diseases are rising.”
