ShareThisA new government survey published Thursday finds that rates of vaccination for the nation's teens are rising, but are still well below goals in most states.
The household sampling survey, done by phone each year for the past three years by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, includes for the first time estimates of vaccination rates by state among 13-to-17-year-olds.
The survey looks at vaccination rates for three shots that have only recently started to be recommended for pre-teens -- a combination tetanus, diphtheria-pertussis dose (or Tdap), a vaccine against bacterial meningitis and, for girls, the new vaccine to protect against human papillomavirus infections that raise the risk for cervical cancer.
It also measures coverage for three vaccines that children are supposed to get at a younger age-- measles-mumps-rubella (MMR), hepatitis B and chickenpox -- but are often missed or even deliberately skipped by parents due to cost or doubts about vaccine safety.
Other CDC surveys show that up to a quarter of toddlers under age two are not vaccinated on schedule, and a 2007 Scripps Howard News Service review of vaccine exemption reports filed with the CDC suggested that hundreds of thousands of children enter school without protection from potentially deadly diseases.
Dr. Melinda Wharton, deputy director for the CDC's National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases said that before 2005, there were no vaccines recommended just for pre-teens, and that "adding these new vaccines has been challenging."
Just three states-- Arizona, New Hampshire and New York -- achieved better than 50 percent coverage for the shots targeted for pre-teens in the 2008 survey, and only 14 hit that mark for even one of the vaccines.
The news is a little better for the "catch-up" vaccines of childhood, with just under 90 percent of nearly 18,000 surveyed teens having gotten two doses of the MMR vaccine and the hepatitis shot. But only about 34 percent of teens who never had chickenpox have gotten the recommended two doses of that vaccine.
Overall, coverage rates improved slightly for all the vaccines except varicella and Tdap, the survey showed.
"We have the most room for improvement for vaccines that are recommended at 11 or 12 years of age and for making sure that teens who are not immune to chickenpox get the vaccine as recommended,'' said Wharton, whose agency has been promoting vaccinations for teens.
Black teens had about a 6 percent lower vaccination rate than white teens for the chickenpox and Tdap shots, but teen girls living below the poverty level actually had 11 percent higher coverage rates for the HPV shot than those living at or above poverty level. Officials said that might be because at around $200, the new vaccine is the most expensive offered teens, but is covered by a federal program that supplies shots for uninsured or Medicaid-insured children, while some private insurers still don't cover the cost of the vaccine.
On the Net: http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/
(E-mail Lee Bowman at bowmanl(at)shns.com. Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)
With TEENVACCINE-CHART
