Children of military personnel may sometimes have difficulty adjusting to a new life each time their parents move and, as a new study points out, this situation may also pose problems to their health.
Dr. Angela Dunn, an intelligence service officer at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said that kids from military families often have a lower rate of vaccination compared to children from non-military families. The cause, however, is still unclear.
"Is it that they are not getting vaccines? Or that they are not documented?" Dunn said. "Both have a risk factor. They move around a lot; they don't have the same primary care providers all throughout childhood."
In her research, conducted while she was still a student at the University of California, San Diego, Dunn and her colleagues examined data collected by the National Immunization Survey (NIS) in a six-year period.
The researchers discovered that from a sample of 3,421 children who were 19 months to three years old, from military families, 28 percent did not have updated vaccination records. This figure compares to about 21 percent of the total number of children in the country.
The 7 percent difference is vital because in order to decrease the chances of a disease spreading in a community, the vaccination rate must be between 75 to 95 percent. The result of the research points to only about 72 percent for military children.
"Any community, military and non-military alike, depends on herd immunity to keep the most vulnerable safe from vaccine preventable diseases," Dunn explained. "Measles, for example, requires a community to have 90 to 95 percent vaccination coverage rate to achieve herd immunity. This is why we recommend all persons who are able to receive vaccinations do so."
Dunn further said there may be several factors that could cause such a low vaccination rate among children from military families. One possible reason is that these families often have to move because of the nature of the parents' work.
"Military families are a highly mobile population, and thus, children often see multiple health care providers during their first few years of life when many vaccines are recommended," she said.
As Dunn pointed out, the recommendations of the study focus on the possible reasons for the low vaccination coverage rates. The researchers do not want to send a message that the health of military children is being neglected.
According to the CDC's recommended schedule of immunization, children should receive 25 different vaccinations by the time they become 6 years old. This is to reduce their susceptibility to 14 types of diseases, such as polio, measles, rotavirus, and influenza.
To address the issue of low vaccination rates for children from military families, Dunn suggested that a more standardized record keeping should be implemented. Through the use of an electronic immunization registry, vaccination records from military kids could be monitored better and be used to notify providers if a child is in need of vaccination.
The result of the study is published in the Journal of Pediatrics.
Photo: PATH Global Health | Flickr
