What’s really vexing the US health officals is that “why do parents refuse to vaccinate their children?” The NY Times has reported that the US health officals are extremely concerned about the growing number of parents refusing to vaccinate their children and surging number of school children being exempted from being vaccinated.

The reason cited by the parents who are refusing to vaccinate their children is that they believe vaccines may cause health problems, such as autism or other neurological disorders to their children. But, on the contrary, the public health officials maintain that there’s no solid evidence linking vaccines to autism or other neurological disorders. The situation has triggered up a debate between the public health officials on one side and parents refusing to vaccinate their children on the other.

Often, parents object to inoculations because of personal beliefs and they feel that vaccines are linked to autism and other disorders. Seeing this, several states have allowed medical exemptions, and most have permitted religious exemptions. Johns Hopkins University has reported that 20 states allow some type of personal exemption.  

According to the article published in the NY Times, “States require school children to be vaccinated, but allow exemptions for families whose religious beliefs prohibit vaccination. Some 20 states also allow exemptions for parents whose “personal beliefs” prompt them to skip vaccination for their children. In 2004, 2.5% of children in those states were unvaccinated because of persomal belief exemptions, up from less than 1% in 1991.”

According to the CDC Report, “12 kids fell ill with the measles last month in San Diego. Measles is a childhood disease made rare in this country by vaccination. Nine of the kids had skipped vaccination because their parents objected; the other three were too young to receive the vaccine. Most children recover from measles without lasting problems, but the disease causes death in one or two out of every 1,000 cases, and serious complications such as retardation in others.”

In the NY Times, Mark Sawyer, a pediatrician and infectious disease specialist at Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego, said, “The very success of immunizations has turned out to be an Achilles’ heel. Most of these parents have never seen measles, and don’t realize it could be a bad disease so they turn their concerns to unfounded risks. They do not perceive risk of the disease but perceive risk of the vaccine.”

According to Saad Omer, an assistant scientist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, less than 1% of children in personal-belief exemption states weren't vaccinated based on the exemption in 1991, and by 2004, the figure rose to 2.54 %. Omer said, "If you have clusters of exemptions, you increase the risk of exposing everyone in the community."