Parental vaccination beliefs in inner-city population described.

2004 OCT 6 - (NewsRx.com & NewsRx.net) -- Investigators describe parental beliefs about vaccination among an ethnically diverse inner-city population in a recent issue of the Journal of the National Medical Association.

"To characterize the knowledge and attitudes of an ethnically diverse group of inner-city parents regarding childhood immunizations, we conducted structured telephone interviews with 102 primary caretakers at an academic ambulatory pediatric practice during the winter of 2001-2002. The sample was ethnically diverse, with 36% African-American, 41% Hispanic, and 15% white. Half the households had infants or toddlers in the home, and 36% had children with conditions placing them at high risk for influenza," scientists writing in report.

"Almost all parents felt that their children should be immunized against diseases in, general (98%), but significant proportions also believed that children received more immunizations than necessary (23%), that immunizations could weaken a child's immune system (36%), or that the influenza vaccine could itself make a child ill (48%)," reported Pamela Fitch at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and Andrew Racine Montefiore at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. "Younger parents, those with infants, and parents of children at risk for complications of influenza were less likely to hold these beliefs while race/ethnicity, marital status, parent's ...