Nonprofits on the Vaccination Front

The importance of immunizing children against preventable disease goes far beyond the benefits to the individual youth who has been inoculated. In the same way, the risks and costs involved in failing to achieve high vaccination rates are many and varied, and far-reaching.

That is the proper context for discussing the laudable work of one large coalition of Valley-based nonprofit groups. Immunizing children against the likes of hepatitis B, diphtheria and childhood diseases saves lives, avoids days lost from school, and prevents a range of debilitating conditions, including some that can result in expensive lifelong learning problems.

If you are somehow smug and satisfied that your children have been vaccinated, and think that there is nothing further to be considered here, guess again. Consider the mother or father who stays home to care for a child who has succumbed to an illness that could have been avoided. He or she might be one of your employees. Consider the costs, to the cash-strapped school systems you help pay for, of special programs for those children whose ability to learn has been marred, irreparably perhaps, by preventable disease.

According to the National Commission to Prevent Infant Mortality, every dollar spent on childhood immunizations saves us $10 in future medical costs. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the resurgence of one such disease--measles--needlessly afflicted 55,000 people over one two-year period, resulting in $20 million in avoidable hospital costs.

The problem is that cities such as Los Angeles have scant resources for the kind of public campaign needed to increase vaccination rates beyond the estimated 42% of all 2-year-old children who have received inoculations. That is where the San Fernando Valley Unity Coalition, a group of 60 nonprofits, has stepped in.

On a recent Sunday, for example, the Coalition put together a free inoculations clinic for several hundred children from the Valley’s poorer households. The vaccines had been donated and local nurses volunteered their time in giving the inoculations. In the process, many who would not have been vaccinated now have a far better chance of completing childhoods that can be more productive in a number of ways.

The clinic was to be the first of many that organizers plan to conduct in poor areas in the Valley over the next several months. They included El Proyecto del Barrio, which helped run the immunization clinic.

These nonprofit groups are performing an admirable service in a time of fiscal hardships, both for the individuals in need of help and the local governments that are less and less able to provide it.