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 The American Academy of Pediatrics said all children should get the
vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella between 12 and 15 months of
age and again between 4 and 6 years old.
"A family vacation to an amusement park – or a trip to the grocery
store, a football game or school – should not result in children
becoming sickened by an almost 100 percent preventable disease,"
Errol Alden, the group's executive director, said in a statement.
"We are fortunate to have an incredibly effective tool that can
prevent our children from suffering. That is so rare in medicine,"
Alden said.
The California Department of Public Health has reported 68 confirmed
measles cases among state residents since December, most linked to
an initial exposure at Disneyland or its adjacent Disney California
Adventure Park.
Fourteen more cases linked to Disney parks were reported on Friday
out of state - five in Arizona, three in Utah, two in Washington
state and one each in Oregon, Colorado, Nevada and Mexico.
Officials say the outbreak began when an infected person, likely
from out of the country, visited the resort in Anaheim between Dec.
15 and Dec. 20.
Among those infected are at least five Disney employees and a
student at Huntington Beach High School, some 15 miles (24 km) from
the park. The school has ordered its unvaccinated students to stay
home until Jan. 29.
The outbreak has renewed the debate over the so-called
anti-vaccination movement in which fears about potential side
effects of vaccines, fueled by now-debunked theories suggesting a
link to autism, have led a small minority of parents to refuse to
allow their children to be inoculated.
The Los Angeles Times blasted the anti-vaccination movement in an
editorial last week for what it called an "ignorant and
self-absorbed rejection of science."
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The percentage of children vaccinated for measles in California is
slightly below the national average, according to the U.S. Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention.
Barbara Loe Fisher, president of the National Vaccine Information
Center, a group calling for "informed consent" for parents regarding
vaccinations, said the Disneyland outbreak had touched off a "media
frenzy."
"There's a lot of name-calling going on rather than talking about
substantive policy issues," she said.
Homegrown measles, whose symptoms include rash and fever, was
declared eliminated from the United States in 2000. But health
officials say cases imported by travelers from overseas continue to
infect unvaccinated U.S. residents. The sometimes deadly viral
disease can spread swiftly among unvaccinated children.
There is no specific treatment for measles and most people recover
within a few weeks. But in poor and malnourished children and people
with reduced immunity, measles can cause serious complications
including blindness, encephalitis, severe diarrhea, ear infection
and pneumonia.
(Reporting by Dan Whitcomb; Additional reporting by Steve Gorman;
Editing by Susan Heavey and Mohammad Zargham)
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