Whooping cough—which killed just six Americans in 1995—is back big-time, especially on the Westside of Los Angeles, thanks to stupid and stubborn rich people who refuse to
vaccinate on the schedule recommended by the Centers for Disease Control. (LA has the most whooping cough cases of any California county this year: 1,317.)
The Hollywood Reporter has waded into the apparently-conscience-free world of the Westside anti-vaxxers and found a legion of selfish parents enabled by fancy doctors and often expensive schools, which obviously have to balance potential lost tuition from angry parents with potential lost tuition from kids who die of measles.
When parents want to enroll their students in school without proper vaccinations, they have to file a personal belief exemption form and
THR also crunched the numbers on those, revealing that "
wealthy Westside kids — particularly those attending exclusive, entertainment-industry-favored child care centers, preschools and kindergartens — are far more likely" to be un-vaxxed and the rates could soon reach a public health tipping-point.
Here's how bad it is: "The region stretching from Malibu south to Marina del Rey and inland as far as La Cienega Boulevard (and including Santa Monica, Pacific Palisades, Brentwood, West Hollywood and Beverly Hills) averaged a
9.1 percent PBE level among preschoolers for the 2013-14 school year — a 26 percent jump from two years earlier." LA County as a whole had just a 2.2 percent level during the same period. Many individual schools have much higher numbers—as high as 88 percent—that put them about
on par with "developing countries like Chad and South Sudan."
http://la.curbed.com/archives/2014/09/mapping_la_schools_with_vaccination_rates_as_low_as_chad.php