Arizona law requires kids to receive certain vaccines in order to attend school unless a doctor signs a medical exemption form or a parent signs a religious or personal beliefs exemption form. There has been an increasing number of parents who are signing exemption forms- putting herd immunity at risk in some parts of the state. We updated the vaccine exemption forms this school year in order to make sure parents are aware of the importance and of vaccinating their kids and the consequences if they don’t.
The new form asks parents to initial and date after each exempted vaccine to indicate that they’ve been informed of the risks of the vaccine-preventable disease. The form also makes it clear that if there’s an outbreak of a vaccine-preventable disease in a school and their child isn’t vaccinated, he or she may not be allowed to attend school for up to 3 weeks or until the risk period ends.
By Will Humble | 2017-02-10T09:50:03-07:00 October 28th, 2013 | General | 2 Comments
As a pediatrician whose practice is in the middle of a pertussis outbreak affecting schools in the Vail School District (southeast Tucson), I would like to understand why AZDHS does not use the CDC criteria for a pertussis outbreak in a school (2 cases in 42 days) but instead uses 3 cases in 21 days as its criteria. I ask this because while one high school (Empire High School) has met the criteria of 3 in 21 days (resulting in enforcement of ARS 15-873), there have been 3 grade schools that met the CDC criteria prior to that (between August-October). They were not called outbreaks and AR 15-873 was not enforced. Given that the grade schools had pertussis cases prior to the high school, I cannot help but believe that if you were using CDC guidelines for outbreak determination, the continued spread of pertussis in the Vail Schools could have been attenuated. -Chris Hickie, MD, PhD
Tucson, AZ
