Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, February 14, 1992 TAG: 9202140146
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: ATLANTA LENGTH: Medium
VACCINATION PLAN FAILING
A study of children in nine major cities has found no more than four in 10 were vaccinated properly by age 2, federal health officials said Thursday. One city reported a dismal 10 percent.The national Centers for Disease Control reported that compliance with the full recommended immunization schedule for 2-year-olds ranged from 42 percent in El Paso, Texas, to 10 percent in Houston.
The others were: New Orleans, 40 percent; Oakland, Calif., St. Louis and Washington, each 38 percent; New York City's Bronx borough and Cleveland, each 36 percent; and Miami, 27 percent.
Such vaccination levels leave the nation - or at least those cities - well short of the government's immunization goals for the year 2000, said Betty Zell of the CDC's Division of Immunization.
"None of them are good, considering the goal is 90 percent," she said. "As far as the variance between cities, we can't answer why that is."
The U.S. Health and Human Services secretary, Dr. Louis Sullivan, presented in Philadelphia on Thursday a $46 million program to reach that 90 percent goal. He said he was approving immunization plans for six cities, which will be used to develop programs for about 80 other immunization projects.
The initiative resulted from President Bush's call last June for health officials in six cities, Philadelphia, Dallas, Phoenix, Detroit, San Diego and Rapid City, S.D., to examine what could be done to increase immunization among preschool children.
The amount of money for each city's program was not yet determined, Sullivan said.
The CDC's immunization committee says children should have four doses of diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis (DTP) vaccine; three doses of polio vaccine; one dose of measles-mumps-rubella vaccine; and, in most cases, four doses of haemophilus B vaccine before age 2.
CDC officials also have recently recommended three hepatitis B shots for young children, but that was not yet in effect when the nine-city study was conducted.
The CDC said the low vaccination rates have been blamed primarily on parents not returning for the fourth DTP shot at 15 months. But excluding that shot, proper vaccination rates in the nine cities still ranged from only 40 percent to 61 percent, the agency said.
The study was conducted last year by examining the health records of a statistically selected sampling of first-graders in the cities.