With more Texas students going unvaccinated, doctors warn of possible measles outbreak

Texas may be ripe for a measles outbreak due to the rising number of school children not vaccinated against childhood diseases, the dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine told ABC-7.

According to the Associated Press, the state could be the site of the country’s next big fight over stricter requirements for immunizations.

A pro-vaccination Texas nonprofit, Immunization Partnership, says the number of Texas school children who filed exemptions for at least one immunization last school year increased nearly 20-fold since 2003, although the number is still less than 1 percent of enrolled students.

“We’ve been able to achieve widespread vaccine coverage across poor countries in the world and with it we have new numbers to indicate a 50 to 90 percent reduction in childhood deaths globally,” said Dr. Peter Hotez of Baylor College of Medicine. “Sadly, what we’re now seeing in places like Texas is a reversal of those gains due to the fact we have a dramatic increase in the percentage of children that are not getting vaccinated. We’re up to about 50,000 kids that we know about who are not getting vaccinated, but some are saying the numbers are much higher than that.”

Texas requires students to be immunized, unless their parents choose not to for medical or philosophical reasons. It’s among 17 states that allow for exemptions.

ABC-7 checked the number of exemptions filed at districts in the El Paso area in a Texas Tribune database provided by Texas Department of State Health Services. It showed the EPISD has the highest number of exemptions at 208, or .35 percent.

YISD is next at 66 vaccination exemptions, or .16 percent; SISD had 17 (.04); Clint ISD 5 (.05); Canutillo ISD 1 (.02); and San Elizario ISD with 1 (.03).

All but three of the top 30 schools in the state for vaccination exemptions are private schools, according to the Texas Tribune, including Father Yermo School, which had 52 exemptions, or 13.9 percent.

But Father Yermo Principal Sister Karina Tapia told ABC-7 those numbers were a mistake.

“We’re already working with the Texas Department of State Health Services to clarify,” she said. “It was a mistake on our part by our nurse. There are no exemptions at our school. All of our students at Father Yermo have updated immunizations.”

EPISD Director of Health Services Alana Bejarano said sometimes parents object for medical reasons and sometimes religious reasons. Concerns about autism also come up.

“We try to educate parents on the fact that the autism rumors have been dispelled, that vaccines are actually safe and they’re helping decrease the amount of measles or mumps or those kind of outbreaks that happen,” Bejarano said.

“If one kid gets measles, he or she will infect up to 20 other kids who are not vaccinated,” Dr. Hotez said. “We are likely now to start seeing measles outbreaks in Texas because of this dramatic rise in kids that are not getting vaccinated.”

Dr. Hotez attributes the increase in vaccination exemptions to a growing anti-vaccination movement in Texas that is making “erroneous claims that vaccines can cause autism.”

“There’s absolutely no link between vaccines and autism,” Dr. Hotez told ABC-7. “That’s overwhelmingly clear.”