By Ian White

The Daily News

Published July 31, 2009

The county health district has just released its annual plea to parents to “make sure their children’s immunizations are up to date and remember schools require children to be properly immunized.” 

There’s a key word in that admonition. “Require” means that skipping immunization is not a health option, and rightly so. Preventable diseases such as hepatitis A, measles, mumps, rubella, diphtheria and meningitis can run rife through the confines of a school in days, causing untold pain and risking agonizing death for scores of children. 

Chickenpox, tetanus and whooping cough can have similar effect and, even if a child’s suffering is mild, it is distressing in the extreme to see the young body of someone so loved wracked with such torment. 

Beginning Saturday, new requirement rules take effect. Briefly, by the first day of school, students entering kindergarten must be given two doses of the hepatitis A, MMR and chickenpox vaccines. 

Students entering seventh grade must receive two doses of the chickenpox, or varicella, vaccine, and one dose each of Tdap, which fights tetanus, diphtheria and acellular pertussis — commonly known as whooping cough — and meningococcal vaccines. 

Students in seventh grade must be given a booster dose of Tdap if it is more than five years since their last tetanus shot. 

Students in grades one through 12 must conform with the present requirement for two doses of a measles vaccine and one dose each of mumps and rubella — also known as German measles — vaccines. Except for seventh-graders, who must meet the new requirement, they must also conform with the present requirement for one dose of varicella or show documentation of a previous chickenpox illness. Students from eighth to 12th grades must be given a booster dose of Tdap if it is more than 10 years since their last tetanus shot. 

To make it easy to meet the new requirements, the health district will be holding several immunization clinics during August, which is National Immunization Awareness Month. 

Again briefly, they will be held every weekday in the district’s La Marque office at 1207 Oak St., on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at Galveston’s Island Community Center, 4700 Broadway, and on Aug. 8 at Texas City’s 4C’s Clinic, 2000 Texas Ave., Aug. 11 at League City Wal-Mart, 1701 West FM 646, and Aug. 22 at Mall of the Mainland, 10000 Emmett F. Lowry Expressway. 

Full details are available by phone at 409-938-2244 or online at gchd.org. 

If your schoolchildren require vaccination, make sure you take them along to one of the clinics — and don’t forget to take their immunization records, if you have them. 

The health district staff members will do all in their power to make your visit as pleasant as possible but, even if your child cries with the pain of the jab, remember that this momentary instinct is nothing compared with the misery of suffering from any of the conditions immunization seeks to eradicate.
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