As the new school year progresses, parents expect kids to come home with the usual round of coughs and sniffles. But not measles, or chicken pox or any of the childhood diseases made extinct by vaccines.
The fact is they're not as gone as we thought. And as more parents decide not to vaccinate their children, outbreaks of old-time disease are expected to become more frequent.
California's public health department reports just under 90 percent of San Diego's public school kindergartners last year were fully immunized during the last school year.
An upcoming Nova documentary, "Vaccines - Calling The Shots," explores the dilemma some parents face when deciding whether to vaccinate their children.
Filmmaker Sonya Pemberton traveled the world interviewing medical professionals and researchers about the risks to children and to society when parents chose not to immunize.
Pemberton said the people who don’t vaccinate at all are a very small group, about 1 percent in the United States, but said "doctors who are in the front line and have to deal with the ill and sometimes dying babies and children are hugely concerned."
A measles outbreak in New York City in 2013 illustrates how quickly an infectious disease can spread when people aren't vaccinated.
Simon Fensterzaub, a New York City doctor interviewed in the film, describes seeing a child come in with a rash and he said he couldn’t quite believe what he was be seeing might be measles because he’d never seen it clinically, only in textbooks.
"Doctors today don’t ever see diphtheria and rarely see measles up until recently so you have a whole generation of doctors and patients who haven’t seen these diseases," Pemberton said. "That’s part of the issue why we’re seeing a hesitancy around vaccines it’s clearly because people have forgotten the risks of the diseases themselves."
The film spends a considerable amount of time discussing autism and the fears some people still have about its links to vaccines even though research by British physician Andrew Wakefield that showed a link between vaccines and autism has been discredited.
"I think it’s a matter of the science needs to find some of the real underlying causes (of autism) and to be able to clarify for parents to feel absolutely comfortable," Pemberton said. "But I think that most parents should be absolutely comforted by the fact that all over the world scientists are asking the hard questions and not finding the link between vaccines and autism.
