Measles Become Hot School Subject

Even though Orange County has experienced 79 reported cases of measles, the highest number in the state, since an outbreak at Disneyland last month, no one has yet reported contracting the contagious disease in the Laguna Beach Unified School District, state and local health officials said this week.

Regardless, some parents say the outbreak is making them uneasy. They’re rethinking decisions to opt out from vaccines and second-guessing taking their children to crowded places. One local doctor’s office, Caduceus Medical Group, is offering free immunizations.

“We are worried about it,” said parent Glenda Kuish. She has one son who is vaccinated and attends El Morro Elementary School and another who is not and attends the private Anneliese’s Schools’ Aliso campus for preschoolers and kindergarteners in south Laguna. The outbreak of the all-but-eradicated childhood disease is an ongoing topic of discussion among mothers of El Morro students, she said Tuesday.

The Annielese Willowbrook campus for preschoolers through sixth-graders in Laguna Canyon was among the schools with the highest rate for unimmunized kindergarteners in the state. Terri Herkimer, executive director of Anneliese’s Schools, on Wednesday disputed the statistics recently compiled by the Los Angeles Times. The data said that the Willowbrook campus was listed at 11.9 percent, which means that five out of 42 kindergarteners there have not been immunized. Herkimer said the statistic is too high.

Of the 225 preschoolers enrolled at the Willowbrook campus, 21 were exempted from the polio, hepatitis or MMR (mumps, measles, rubella) vaccines, while 27 of the 216 grade school students were not immunized for one or all of the childhood vaccines, she said. That combined figure means 12.5 percent of the school’s total enrollment lack immunization.

In Laguna’s public schools, 152 enrolled students have not received one or both doses of the MMR vaccine out of 3,074 total enrollment, amounting to a 4.9 percent non-immunization rate, said district spokeswoman Leisa Winston. Public health statistics say 88 percent of El Morro kindergartners and 98 percent of TOW kindergartners enrolled this school year were vaccinated.

With the measles all but eradicated after widespread vaccinations, known as “herd immunity,” most doctors now practicing in the U.S. have never seen a case of the measles, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Herd immunity keeps diseases in check, according to health officials, and is lost when the unimmunized population exceeds 8 percent.

Kuish intends to get her 3-year-old, Landon, immunized and has quashed Aiden’s plan to spend his sixth birthday at Disneyland. “At the moment, it’s no,” she said. Kuish, a native Argentinian, lives in north Laguna with her husband, Bradford, who, she said, isn’t as adamant about immunizations as she is. “Maybe I’m a little paranoid,” she said. “You have to take care of it, there are so many things that can come up.”

Anneliese’s schools follow the same immunization policy as the Laguna Beach school district, promoting immunization as well as a change in the personal beliefs exemption made last year by the California Department of Public Health. To obtain an exemption for vaccinations, parents and guardians are now required to get advice about the benefits and risks of immunizations and the signature of a health care provider. The new form still allows for religious exemption if medical advice or treatment is not the practitioner’s choice.

District students who have not been immunized are not being asked to stay home because there are no reports of measles among the student population, said Winston. If a case of measles does surface, children who lack vaccinations will be sent home, the district informed parents of unimmunized children in a letter, she said.

The measles starts with a fever, cough, runny nose, conjunctivitis (pink eye) that can last up to four days before a rash appears, according to the CDC. Already-infected people are contagious for at least four days after they get the rash. “Measles is transmitted by contact with an infected person through coughing and sneezing,” says a CDC report. Even after an infected person leaves an area, the virus remains alive for up to two hours on surfaces and in the air, the report says.

“This outbreak is a little close to home,” said Christine, a mother of a 2-year-old who lives in Laguna Beach and declined to be identified fully. Christine said she and her husband had decided not to vaccinate their son at birth and have changed their minds since the outbreak.

“He still tends to put things in his mouth and he picks stuff up at parks and we spend a lot of our day there,” she said. “The reason we did not get vaccines when he was born was because we did not know the state of his immune system.”

Christine said she still believes that childhood diseases strengthen the immune system. “When I did my initial research two years ago, there had not been a significant outbreak,” she said. Although she has two friends whose children have had adverse reactions to vaccines, she said, “at this point, in my opinion, the vaccine is not that much of a threat.”

The district’s PTA council also supports immunization. “While some try to frame the current situation in terms of a debate with opinions on both sides being given equal weight, the preponderance of the evidence in terms of good science and sound health practices tells us that we should be empowering parents to choose immunizations,” said Kathleen Fay, president of the Laguna Beach PTA Council.

“Everyone has to do what they think is best for their own child,” said parent Sharael Kolberg, whose sixth-grade daughter, Katelyn, is vaccinated and attends Thurston Middle School. “Even though people are saying ‘Your kid’s going to be exposed to other kids who aren’t immunized,’ I can’t worry about that.”