Immunizations
Colorado law (Board of Health rule 6 CCR 1009-2) requires all students attending Colorado schools and licensed child cares to be vaccinated against certain diseases, unless an exemption is filed. The minimum number and spacing of doses is set forth in the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) Child and Adolescent Immunization Schedules. Meeting the initial vaccine requirements does not excuse a student from meeting additional requirements. In addition to the vaccines required for school entry, there are several vaccines recommended by the ACIP that provide protection against other diseases. These include Meningococcal, Hepatitis A, Rotavirus, Human papillomavirus and Influenza.
Please click https://www.cohealthdata.dphe.state.co.us/Data/Details/1 to view compliance rates in Colorado as well as DCSD.
Timing is Everything
Studies have shown that the timing of the administration of the MMR is crucial to protection. Check with your doctor for the possible administration of an booster.
De Serres G, Boulianne N, Defay F, et al. Higher risk of measles when the first dose of a 2-dose schedule of measles vaccine is given at 12-14 months versus 15 months of age. Clin Infect Dis. 2012;55(3):394-402. doi:10.1093/cid/cis439PubMedGoogle ScholarCrossref
Measles
Measles is a highly infectious respiratory disease that can result in severe, sometimes permanent, complications including pneumonia, seizures, brain damage, and even death. Symptoms include rash, cough, runny nose, eye irritation, and fever. Children with measles often feel miserable and may miss school, with loss of appetite, diarrhea, and sensitivity to any light.
Measles is highly contagious and spreads easily when an infected person breathes or coughs. In fact, it is so contagious that if an individual has measles, up to 9 in 10 of their close contacts who are not immune will also become infected. Infected people can spread measles to others from four days before through four days after the rash appears.
Measles virus is especially dangerous because it has the ability to destroy what’s been earned: immune memory from previous infections. Meanwhile, the process of fighting measles infection leaves patients especially vulnerable to secondary infection.
What Are Vaccines, and How Do They Work?
The goal of vaccines is to greatly reduce the complications caused by childhood diseases. Although some diseases might be good for us to catch and leave us stronger, others cause more harm than good and leave us weaker. Vaccines prepare our bodies to fight against harmful diseases that we are likely to encounter in the world.
To understand how vaccines work, imagine that your immune system is a dictionary. For every substance that your body encounters, the immune system records a definition and an action. The definition is the description of the substance. The action tells the body what to do with the substance, like absorb it or attack it.
But, before your body knows what to do with something, it must identify the substance first. The way your body identifies something is based on the shapes found on the surface of that thing. These shapes are called antigens—physical characteristics of an object that the immune system can recognize. Vaccines help your body identify what infections look like so that the immune system can use its natural defenses to treat them.
For example, imagine a child eating a strawberry. It is important that the immune system has identified the strawberry as food and absorbs it. Now imagine a child who catches a cold. It is important that the immune system has identified the cold as harmful and attacks it. Vaccines don’t change how your body acts when it encounters something; they just help your body identify what it encountered.
Children are born with a bunch of blank definitions for serious childhood diseases like measles, pertussis (whooping cough), rotavirus, and others. If the child is unvaccinated and encounters one of those diseases, it takes time for the child’s immune system to examine the disease, record a description of it, and decide if the disease should be attacked. Unfortunately, this process takes so long that, by the time the definition and action are recorded, the disease may have already caused some permanent harm to the child. Vaccines teach our immune systems to fight diseases that otherwise would take them too long to recognize as harmful.
A vaccine for a particular disease may contain deactivated bacteria from that disease, or a deactivated or weakened live virus. The vaccine is given to a child with blank definitions. The child’s immune system can take its time defining what the disease looks like and noting to attack it. When encountering the live disease for the first time, the child’s immune system will be ready to fight it immediately and prevent serious illness or permanent harm.
