By Martin Espinoza, The Press Democrat
At Roseland Elementary School in Santa Rosa, all but one of the 118 kids who entered kindergarten in 2009 were fully immunized, according to the latest state records.
With an “up-to-date” immunization rate of 99 percent, the school shows the benefit of an on-site children’s clinic that has been aggressively giving children the Tdap pertussis booster, meningococcal vaccine and varicella HPV vaccine, as well as the annual flu vaccine.
“We’ve been very proactive,” said Meredith Kieschnick, medical director of both the Roseland Children’s Health Center and the Elsie Allen Health Center.
“We don’t just want to vaccinate kids, we want them to come in for their ‘well teen exam’ and get some health promotion around all their vaccines,” she said.
Kieschnick, the lead pediatrician for Santa Rosa Community Health Centers, which operates the two clinics, said that half the patients at Roseland Children’s Health Center, about 1,300 kids, will be affected by a new law that requires all students entering grades seven to 12 to be vaccinated with the Tdap booster for pertussis, or whooping cough.
Of these young patients, 89 percent already have received the Tdap vaccine, she said. Elsewhere in Sonoma County, immunization rates are far lower.
In 2009, 324 of the 6,109 Sonoma County kindergartners had a “personal-belief exemption” from at least one vaccine. The resulting percentage of exempted kindergartners was 5.3 percent, more than twice the state’s overall 2.03 percent.
The percentage of fully immunized students entering kindergarten classes in Sonoma County has steadily declined from 92 percent in 2002 to 88 percent last year, according to state records.
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