News from the FDA/CDC

Mississippi has highest varicella vaccination rate

Publish date: December 1, 2017
By
Richard Franki

 

FROM MMWR

Coverage for two doses of varicella vaccine among kindergarten students was highest in Mississippi and lowest in the District of Columbia, said Ranee Seither and associates at the National Center of Immunization and Respiratory Disease at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta.

For the 2016-2017 school year, 99.4% of Mississippi children enrolled in kindergarten received the state-required two doses of varicella vaccine, compared with 84.6% in D.C. The median was 93.8% for the 42 states that require two doses and 96.5% for those 42 plus the 7 states that reported and only require one dose. Oklahoma and Wyoming “did not report data because of widespread problems with the quality of data reported by schools,” the CDC investigators wrote (MMWR 2017;66[40]:1073-80).

Coverage of state-required doses in kindergartners, 2016-2017
Two cities – New York and Houston – reported separately from their respective states, although their data also were included in their states’ overall rates. New York City had a varicella vaccination rate of 97.2% for two doses, and Houston’s rate was 95.7%. Only three of the eight U.S. territories require varicella vaccination for kindergartners: Puerto Rico vaccinated 95.9%, the U.S. Virgin Islands reported a rate of 88.1%, and the Northern Mariana Islands vaccinated 88% in 2016-2017, according the CDC investigators.

The data for the CDC analysis, which included 3,973,172 kindergartners for the 2016-2017 school year, were collected by federally funded immunization programs in the 50 states and D.C.

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