By MARY SELL, Alabama Daily News
Bills in the Alabama Legislature would require health care providers to check a statewide patient database before administering vaccines and update the registry when they give any.
The database is currently available to anyone in the state who provides vaccines, Alabama Public Health Officer Scott Harris said. Pediatricians do a pretty good job of updating it, he said, but some other providers do not.
“The bill would require anyone who gives vaccines to enter them in the system,” he said. The one exception is for annual flu vaccines.
When children move across the state, their medical records don’t always follow them, Harris said.
“The whole gist of the it is to make sure kids can have their records accessed when they’re going through school,” Harris said.
Besides providers, school nurses can access the “ImmPrint” database. ImmPrint stands for Immunization Patient Registry with Integrated Technology.
Last week, an infant too young to be vaccinated was the first confirmed measles case in Alabama in recent years. The disease was considered eradicated in 2000, but the Centers for Disease Control has reported multiple outbreaks in at least six states and 764 individual cases this year.
The measles case is a good example of why the registry is needed.
“Most people my age don’t know what we got (vaccinated for) or when we got it,” Harris said.
And in “outbreak situations,” health and school officials would easily know who has been vaccinated and who has not, Harris said.
Sen. Tim Melson, R-Florence, is the sponsor of Senate Bill 256. He said the registry also prevents over-vaccination by alerting medical professionals if they have already been given to a patient.
“With concerns about vaccines, you can see what a child has had,” Melson said. “It’s a good to have a record of who’s been treated.”
His bill is waiting for a vote in the Senate. A House version of the bill, House Bill 522 sponsored by Rep. April Weaver, R- Brierfield, is in the House Health Committee on Wednesday.
According to the department of health, of the 770,835 public and private school students in 2017-2018, nearly 93 percent of them had up-to-date vaccination records on file at their schools. Pickens County had the lowest reported rate of up-to-date records, 77 percent.
State law allows the state health officer and the state board of health to decide which diseases children must be immunized for prior to attending school. The department requires vaccines for diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, polio, measles, mumps, rubella and chickenpox.
State law also allows for exemptions from vaccines based on religious or medical reasons.