School-Age Children to Get Vaccine for Measles : Inoculations: The county hopes the plan will thwart possible epidemic of the highly contagious disease.

Ventura County plans to head off a measles epidemic that has struck much of Southern California by inoculating young school-age children, the health coordinator for the county superintendent of schools said Friday.

Ventura County Public Health Services plans to offer free immunization clinics at area schools, but the schedule for those clinics has not been announced, a health department spokeswoman said.

The schools are to send notices home with children that stress the importance of the shots to prevent the spread of the highly contagious disease--even if they are the second vaccinations for some children who were inoculated as infants--said Jean Varden, the health coordinator for Ventura County schools.

“There are epidemics happening all around us,” Varden said. “We are trying to prevent that from happening here.”

Varden and other health officials say the situation has not become serious in Ventura County. But Los Angeles County and the Inland Empire counties in Southern California have experienced dramatic increases in the number of measles cases since the epidemic began in late 1987, health officials say.

Although Varden said the free shots will be offered to all kindergarten and first-grade students, the county health department would not release the ages of the children targeted. Dr. Lawrence Dodds, county health officer, has scheduled a news conference Monday to explain the immunization program.

In Ventura County, there were eight cases of measles in 1989, and there have been two cases so far this year, Dodds said. There have been no deaths in the county as a result of the disease, Dodds said.

But action is needed to prevent a possible epidemic, which could result in deaths, officials said. This year in Los Angeles County, there have been six deaths out of 1,407 cases. Last year, there were 17 deaths out of 1,202 cases.

“We are making plans for a reimmunization campaign to provide a second dose of the MMR,” he said, referring to the shot that vaccinates against measles, mumps and rubella, or German measles.

Such reimmunization campaigns have been recommended by the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, which keeps national statistics on communicable diseases, officials said.

“The largest number of serious illness and death as a result of measles in the last several years have been in children under 7 years old,” said Varden, a registered nurse who advises the county superintendent of schools on health care for the county’s 110,000 students in kindergarten through high school.

Although children in Ventura County will be offered the immunizations at no charge, the MMR vaccine costs $5 at regular health department clinics, Varden said.

“This is the same kind of special effort made for polio many, many years ago,” she said, referring to the free clinics set up in schools during the 1950s to combat polio, a killer epidemic that swept the country in 1954.

Like polio, measles is caused by an easily spread virus, according to a report from the American Public Health Assn.

Measles causes a cough and a red splotchy rash that begins on the face in the third to seventh day of the disease. On the fourth to the seventh day, the rash spreads to the rest of the body, the report says.

Measles is spread through contact with nasal or throat secretions of infected people, according to the report.

It is contagious just before the appearance of the rash and up to four days after its outbreak, the report says.

EPIDEMIC IN SOUTHLAND

More measles reported in three months than in all of 1989. B6