Hundreds of Michigan schools and child-care programs are vulnerable to outbreaks of contagious disease such as measles, whooping cough and chicken pox based on the percentage of children with vaccination waivers, according to public health data.
Almost 400 public and private K-12 schools and 295 day care programs had 10 percent or more of their students submit a vaccine waiver form in lieu of immunization records in 2017, state records show.
And more than 1,000 K-12 schools and 800 day cares have vaccine waiver rates of more than 5 percent.
The state collects immunization data from about 3,900 schools and 3,700 child-care programs.
Public health officials say schools should have vaccination rates of 95 percent to protect against measles, the most contagious disease. A current measles outbreak in the Pacific Northwest has been fueled by people who shun immunizations.
While Michigan has improved its school vaccination rates in the past few years, there are still too many schools with worrisome numbers, said Bob Swanson, director of the state’s immunization program.
“If more than 10 percent of your kids aren’t vaccinated, there’s a chance of an outbreak,” he said.
To have so many Michigan schools and day cares with relatively high waiver rates is “really scary,” said Dr. Maureen Ford, a Mattawan school board member who is an emergency room physician and the mother of three school-age children.
“It’s something we need to be paying attention to,” Ford said. “When you get below 95 percent (vaccination rate), you’re losing your herd immunity,” which protects the population against contagious disease.
Herd immunity occurs when enough people are vaccinated that contagious disease is stopped in its tracks because of lack of people who can spread the virus.
Public health officials stress the importance of herd immunity to protect babies too young to be vaccinated and elderly people where immunizations have waned as well as those who can’t get vaccinated for medical reasons and individuals where the vaccine is ineffective.
“If you don’t have that herd immunity, you’re at risk” of the kind of outbreak occurring in Oregon and Washington state, said Linda Vail, the Ingham County health director.
Vail notes measles is so contagious that a person can catch it from entering a room where a measles patient coughed an hour before.
Ford said that she’s never seen a case of measles, but she’s treated patients with pertussis, better known as whooping cough — another vaccine-preventable disease.
“People who are against vaccines say these diseases aren’t that bad,” Ford said. But as a doctor, she knows “even the typical version of these illnesses aren’t fun and what’s really a problem are the 1 percent of cases where there are complications.”
Before the measles vaccine “there were people who died or had permanent disabilities from measles,” she said. “We don’t appreciate how sick kids can get” from vaccine-preventable illnesses.
In 2017, about 50 people in Michigan were hospitalized because of pertussis or chicken pox, according to state records. And last year, Michigan had 19 cases of measles — the state’s highest number in 24 years, Swanson said.
While many people think these diseases have been eradicated, “they are not gone,” Swanson said. “You need high vaccination rates so they don’t get out of control.”