Daviess County Health Department officials are starting an effort to increase the vaccination levels of infants and children.
The immunization reports from the state contained good news and bad news. The good news was that Daviess County was no longer the worst at childhood vaccinations. The bad news is that the county still lags behind 90 other Indiana counties in the percentage of children vaccinated.
“When it comes to vaccinating our children, according to the state we are falling severely behind,” said Administrator for the Daviess County Health Department Kellie Streeter. “We have a sustainable immunization program. We just need to increase our coverage levels for vaccinations.”
Health officials say there are several reasons Daviess County sits near the bottom of child vaccination rates. Something that is also true in the adult population when it comes to getting immunized against the flu and COVID.
“We attribute a lot of that to our large and growing Amish and Mennonite population, along with our growing immigrant population,” said Streeter. “Vaccine hesitancy and more waiting by parents to get their children immunized is also impacting those numbers.”
Local health officials say they do work closely with schools to try and get the children up to date.
“During school registration we are on-site, working with the schools to go over all of the records with the parents,” said Streeter. “We always see an increase around the start of school. Children are required to have a baseline level of vaccinations, unless they have a religious exemption.”
Daviess County recommends children be vaccinated beyond the state required base level. One suggested addition is HPV for middle schoolers.
Streeter says the county health department plans to turn around the vaccination levels and she says it starts by talking to parents about protecting their children.
“We have identified the best way is to start with a dedicated, full-time, immunization nurse,” said Streeter. “We will become more involved with off-site activities in our schools and other community clinics. Education is the cornerstone of reaching those parents. We will make phone calls, and meet oneon- one with them.”
To try and make more inroads into the Amish Community, the health department will be partnering with some of the off-site medical clinics in the community.
“We are partnering with Memorial Health to do more clinics in the Amish community. We will be going to more remote locations to help those parents get their children vaccinated. It is going to be a lot of work off-site on evenings and weekends,” said Streeter. “We really do believe that education about what is available and why it will help will raise our levels.”
One thing that will assist in the expanded outreach effort is a 100% funded grant for almost $100,000 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention through the Indiana Department of Health.
“Because of our low level of immunizations, we qualify for those funds,” said Streeter. “Most of the money will go to the nurse and expenses related to the outreach effort.”
Raising immunization rates is something that will not happen overnight, but Streeter points out the health department went through something similar when Daviess County was number one in infant mortality in Indiana.
She says a multi-year effort involving area hospitals and clinics significantly lowered that number and the same can happen with vaccinations.
“That took years and this will be the same,” said Streeter. “We have to reach these people and address the problem. We have been lucky in that we do not see outbreaks of infectious disease, but we do have a lot of illnesses that could have been mitigated. It is like sitting on a bubble. We just need to protect our children and immunizations can do that.”
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