(CNN) — There has been a small increase in vaccine exemption rates among kindergarteners in the United States, according to a new report from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The finding, published in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report on Thursday, shows that rates of young children not receiving vaccinations against certain diseases, including measles, continued to climb in recent years.
For the 2018-2019 school year, the national percentage of kindergartners with an exemption from one or more required vaccines was 2.5%, which was a slight increase from 2.3% during the previous school year and 2.1% in the 2016-2017 school year.
The percentage of kindergartners with an exemption from one or more required vaccines ranged from 0.1% in Mississippi to 7.7% in Idaho and Oregon.
Nationally, among those vaccine-exempt kindergartners, only 0.3% had a medical exemption while 2.2% had a nonmedical exemption.
Researchers wrote in the report, “Measles outbreaks affecting school-age children across multiple states during the 2018-19 school year underscore the importance of both school vaccination requirements for preventing disease spread and school coverage assessments to identify pockets of under-vaccination.”
