Maine had a record number of chickenpox infections among school children during the school year that ended in June. Unfortunately, the state Department of Health and Human Services won’t release data on where these outbreaks occurred.
DHHS officials say the outbreaks are long over, so releasing the information wouldn’t serve any public good.
This is too narrow a perspective.
There were numerous bills regarding vaccination in the last legislative session. Some sought to make it harder for parents to opt their children out of required vaccines while others sought to make it easier. Instead of continue a debate based largely on anecdotes, DHHS has a chance to provide useful data to inform the public policy debate.
Parents, health care workers and others can access a database of school vaccination rates, which is helpful in identifying places where there could be risk because of low vaccination rates. The state, however, should go a step further and offer the public the ability to compare schools where outbreaks are reported with their vaccination rates.
Were the outbreaks at schools with low vaccination rates? If so, this would confirm public health warnings that low vaccination rates can lead to outbreaks of preventable diseases. It would provide important information to consider during future legislative debates on vaccination policy.
From September 2014 through mid-May 2015, 84 cases of chickenpox were reported in Maine children, according to the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s nearly double the 44 cases reported during the same period of the 2013-2014 school year.
Why?
Public health and medical experts blame declining vaccination rates. Of the cases this year, 68 percent occurred in unvaccinated or under-vaccinated kids, including four children too young to receive the vaccine, according to DHHS.
Federal data show the percentage of Maine parents choosing to skip their children’s vaccines is on the rise. Maine’s vaccination opt-out rate was the fourth highest in the nation during the 2013-2014 school year. Worse, Maine had the largest increase in opt-outs in the country between 2012 and 2014.
Maine is among 18 states that allow parents to exempt their children from school-required immunizations for philosophical reasons. Children also can be exempted from the requirements for medical and religious reasons, though these account for a small fraction of Maine’s opt-outs.
Lawmakers in May rejected a bill to do away with Maine’s philosophical exemption. They passed another bill to require parents to consult with a doctor before claiming an exemption, but Gov. Paul LePage vetoed it. The Legislature sustained the veto.
DHHS recently posted immunization rates by school on its website — a positive development for the sake of public health and transparency. Unfortunately, what the data show is that it is not uncommon for schools to have more than a quarter of children exempted from supposedly mandatory vaccinations.
Coupled with information about where outbreaks occur, these data would help parents know if their children, especially children too young to get vaccinated or who can’t get vaccinated for medical reasons, are at risk.
The Bangor Daily News has asked for chickenpox outbreak data under the Freedom of Access Act. The Portland Press Herald has gone to court to challenge the state’s refusal to provide this information. DHHS argues that releasing this information could identify individual students. It is hard to see how this could be the case.
Instead, releasing this information would help inform the public about infectious disease risks.
“I really feel strongly about this because there’s a lot of people like me with suppressed immune systems who need to know where we can and can’t go and be at risk of exposure,” Susan Murphy, a resident of York who has leukemia, told the Press Herald. “The public has every right to know. It’s just wrong that we don’t.”
