Jabbering about jabs: Why are rates of immunisation of children now falling in the US?

Abstract

As an American, one of the (few) things about the US healthcare "system" that I have always taken pride in is our ability to fully vaccinate virtually all of our children by the time they start school. When I was growing up, before measles vaccine, thousands of cases of measles encephalitis and hundreds of measles related deaths occurred every year in the United States. By the turn of the current century, though, vaccination programmes had eliminated endemic measles, and the few remaining cases reported in the US were related to travel and immigration.