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ASHEVILLE, North Carolina – An outbreak of chickenpox in a private school is now considered the most serious in North Carolina since the development of a vaccine against the virus more than 20 years ago, reported health officials.
On Friday, 36 students from the Asheville Waldorf School had contracted the chicken pox virus, which most people knew as chicken pox. The school has one of the highest rates of religious exemption from vaccination of the state.
The viral infection manifests itself in an itchy rash in most cases and does not usually put life at risk. But the outbreak in Asheville Waldorf is expected to cause concern, said Dr. Jennifer Mullendore of Buncombe County's Department of Health and Human Services.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, chickenpox is particularly dangerous for infants, pregnant women and people with weakened immune systems, such as people with HIV or who are coming out of cancer treatment.
"People do not think it's a serious disease, and for the majority of people, it's not the case – but it's not so for everyone," he said. Mullendore. Two to three out of every 1,000 children infected with chickenpox need hospital care, she said.
"For me, it's not a mild illness, and if you're the parent of any of these kids, you probably do not think it either," Mullendore said.
Each year, the chickenpox vaccine prevents more than 3.5 million cases of chickenpox, 9,000 hospitalizations and 100 deaths, the CDC says.
That's why health care providers have been recommending for years that all medically-able children, namely those with a healthy immune system, be vaccinated, said Mullendore.
Parents of the 152 students in Asheville Waldorf, 110 of whom did not receive the chickenpox vaccine, marketed in the United States in 1995, ignored these recommendations.
Leading the state immunization exemption
The North Carolina Department of Health and Social Services tracks the rate of maternal attendance for which parents requested a religious exemption, which allows them to forego vaccination.
During the 2017-2018 school year, the last year for which data were available, Asheville Waldorf had a higher rate of religious exemptions for vaccination than all other schools in the state except two.
Of the 28 kindergarten children enrolled that year, 19 were exempted from at least one vaccine required by the state for entry to school.
School officials responded to Citizen Times questions on Friday. The school welcomes students from kindergarten to grade six, Mullendore said.
The only two schools in North Carolina to have exceeded the Asheville Waldorf religious exemption rate were private schools in other counties. Both had a 100% exemption rate – one had only one kindergarten pupil, the other had two.
In the same school year, Buncombe County was the state's leader in religious exemption rates for 5.7% of kindergarten children.
"What people need to understand is that when you have pockets of unvaccinated people, they serve as reservoirs for diseases," said Susan Sullivan, a DHHS nurse, who consults with local health departments on vaccines and preventable diseases.
"This is not right for you"
Buncombe County has long faced high vaccination exemption rates, in part from parents who are more afraid of vaccines than the diseases they prevent.
"What's the problem with chickenpox? It does not matter," said Amy Gordon, a resident of Asheville, whose children were vaccinated against polio and other diseases at the same time. end of the 1980s, years before the varicella vaccine was available.
"If I were a parent with a child who was not vaccinated, I would like to send my child to Waldorf School for it to contract chicken pox," said Gordon.
If the vaccine had existed when her children had received their other vaccines in the late 1980s, Gordon would still not have allowed it, she said.
Gordon and others said that vaccines cause a host of health problems, while health care providers and government agencies, such as the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, were unanimous.
For Sullivan and others in the medical field, vaccine-preventable diseases are much more worrying, even when they may seem minor.
In the 1980s, Sullivan was working as a nurse at the Johns Hopkins Oncology Unit when she witnessed the death of chickenpox from an elementary age girl.
The girl, whom Sullivan did not name, had just finished treatment for leukemia and was returning home after being in contact with someone with chicken pox.
"Because her immune system was brand new, the disease spread to her internal organs and she did not survive," Suillivan said. "It reminded me that it was not a mild childhood disease."
Sullivan and Mullendore, echoing the position of health care providers in general, said vaccination is important to protect the community at large.
"It's not just about you," says Sullivan. "It's about the people you interact with: pregnant women, people with AIDS, people who are finishing chemotherapy, they're part of our community, and we have to do everything in our power to protect everyone. "
Follow Sam DeGrave on Twitter: @sgdegrave
© Gannett Co., Inc. 2018. All rights reserved.
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