MMR Vaccination Has Been a Worldwide Success
As I mentioned earlier this week, Great Britain is experiencing an outbreak of measles because of declining vaccination rates. Some parents fear having their children vaccinated using the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine because of unsubstantiated claims that it is linked to autism. Worldwide, however, the MMR vaccine has been extremely successful.
The BBC reports that since it was introduced in the United States in 1975, over 500 million doses of the MMR vaccine have been administered around the world — equivalent to about 10 percent of the world’s population receiving the vaccine.
A major success story with the MMR vaccine has been Finland where the three diseases have been almost wiped out by an aggressive vaccination program that began in earnest in the 1990s.
One of the demands of British parents who fear the MMR vaccine is that their children be offered separate vaccinations for measles, mumps and rubella rather than the combined vaccine. That is precisely how things are handled in Japan where an MMR vaccine was withdrawn in 1993 after a high rate of post-vaccination meningitis cases. But according to the BBC, after the switch from a single vaccination to multiple vaccinations, the disease incidence rate rose markedly and there were 79 deaths from measles in Japan from 1992 to 1997.
One of the problems with multiple vaccinations is that it is far more expensive and, of course, inconvenient, reducing the number of children who will receive all three.
Source:
MMR’s global success. The BBC, February 6, 2002.
The MMR Vaccination Has Been a Worldwide Success by Brian Carnell, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
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