Seattle Schools Community Forum

Update: there is now a ninth child in Washington state who has been hospitalized with this condition. end of update Not sure if this story is widely known but eight Washington state children have come down with polio-like symptoms and one died yesterday in Bellingham.  Three children are from Seattle and one of those is still in the hospital.

From KUOW : In fact, looking at the latest reports of vaccine rates, health officials found that even more parents statewide are foregoing the whooping cough and measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccines. Parents are also increasingly opting out of the polio vaccine. Seventeen years ago, 95.4 percent of kindergarteners in Washington state were vaccinated for polio. It’s even more dramatic in Seattle, where 81.4 percent of kindergarteners have been vaccinated for polio. That’s lower than the 2013 polio immunization rates for 1-year-olds in Zimbabwe, Rwanda, Algeria, El Salvador, Guyana, Sudan, Iran, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia and Yemen, among other countries, according to data from the World Health Organization.

Good story from KUOW on vaccination rates (thanks to reader Wow  ).  I had heard about this trend of more well-to-do families not vaccinating their children at higher rates than other families. Good map of Seattle Schools and vaccination rates. From the story: Instead of vaccinating her children for chickenpox, Kimberly Christensen chose the old fashioned way to immunize them – sending her kids to hang out with infected children.  “Our friends knew of someone and called us,” she said. “So we went over and the kids shared lollipops.” Her kids did get chickenpox. “It was a long month," she said.   But Christensen is not an “anti-vaccinator,” she told me adamantly. “One of my biggest frustrations is that most people think you’re either pro-vaccine or anti-vaccine, and there is no middle ground,” she said. I can only ask, "Is she hoping she can find someone to give them mumps and measles?" I'll also point out that if a child does not get a chickenpo...