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According to a new study from the Graduate School of Public Health at the University of Pittsburgh, Texas's large and small cities are increasingly exposed to measles outbreaks as more and more parents provide their children with vaccines. required.
The study found that "significant measles outbreaks of more than 400 cases could occur at Austin-Round Rock and Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington" with current vaccination rates. The researchers found that, while vaccination rates were still falling by 5% in the state, the magnitude of a possible measles outbreak could increase by 4,000% in some communities.
"If the policy remains unchanged and the public's view of immunization and the importance of vaccinating their children does not change, outbreaks of measles will only get worse," David Sinclair told KUT. principal author.
Texas is the largest state in terms of population that allows parents to choose not to vaccinate their children for non-medical reasons. Sinclair said it made Texas an interesting place to study measles outbreaks.
"The results in Texas may be more relevant than anywhere else in the country," he said.
Texas law currently allows parents to not vaccinate their children for reasons of conscience, which may include religious reasons. According to the study, the number of parents who applied for these exemptions exploded in Texas, from 2,300 in 2003 to 64,000 in 2016.
And schools in the Austin area have particularly high rates of non-medical exemptions.
Note: Data from the annual survey on the state of vaccination carried out by the Department of Health. This map does not include data from students in certain classes with fewer than five exemptions or districts with fewer than 65 students.
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In Austin, the ISD, 2.47% of students had overall awareness exemptions for the 2018-2019 school year, but some schools had rates well above the overall rate in the state of 2.15% during the same period. The international high school, which shares a campus with the Eastside Memorial High School, had a 32% exemption rate. Elementary schools in Zilker and Matthews had the second highest exemption rate at 10% and 9%, respectively.
Exemptions are generally much more common in private schools and charter schools. The Austin Waldorf School has one of the highest rates of non-medical exemptions from the state – nearly half (46%) of its 333 students had benefited from the state of health. an exemption last year. The exemption rate for the Austin Discovery School was 35% and that for the South Campus Austin, 26%, for the Valor Public Schools.
Sinclair said that potential epidemics worsen when there is "geographical clustering" of unvaccinated people.
"If you only have one or two schools where the vaccination rate is about 20% lower than what it should be, then it's enough for that to measles spreads widely in this school, "he said.
Once a large part of one of these schools has been infected, Sinclair said, the outbreak can spread to the entire community outside of the community. school.
According to a press release, the Texas Pediatric Society has asked the Graduate School of Public Health at the University of Pittsburgh to model Texas on a special system that Pitt was to create a simulated population simulation using census data American. The modeling system, known as the Framework for Reconstruction of Epidemiological Dynamics, then assigns these artificial people to move about in their communities in the same way that people would evolve in the real world. The model allows researchers to see how measles could be transmitted from one person to the other.
Using this simulation model and vaccination rates in Texas 2018 schools, the researchers concluded that there was "a significant risk of outbreaks totaling more than 100 cases" in various regions of the state.
"If the rate of vaccination among Texas students continues to decline in schools where the population is under-vaccinated, the potential number of cases associated with measles outbreaks is expected to increase exponentially," the researchers wrote.
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