U of Illinois mumps outbreak grows; vaccinations urged

In the new study, the researchers asked 315 people questions to examine their views on several potentially controversial subjects, including their attitudes toward vaccines and their willingness to vaccinate their kids.

The participants were randomly assigned to one of three groups, with positive and negative attitudes toward vaccination represented equally in each group. One group received a parent’s description of what it was like to have a child with measles, warnings about the importance of vaccination, and photos of a child covered with measles and rubella rashes, or a young boy’s face horribly swollen by mumps.

The modern incarnation of the anti-vaccine movement got “a shot in the arm” from a 1998 study published by The Lancet journal, which found evidence of a connection between some vaccines and the onset of autism. Researchers gave the third group reading materials not related to vaccines.

“It’s more effective to accentuate the positive reasons to vaccinate and take a nonconfrontational approach – “Here are reasons to get vaccinated” – than directly trying to counter the negative arguments against vaccines”, said Keith Holyoak, UCLA Distinguished Professor of Psychology and a senior author of the study.

Many people with anti-vaccine views focus on the perceived risks of vaccines, the researchers noted.

“I think there are immediate steps we could take; we could make it more easy to access this information and put it on a single page that would hopefully become a top hit when you’re Googling”, Horne said.

The National Vaccine Information Center did not return a request for comment. The CDC material also explained that while many parents worry that the vaccine causes autism, many studies have shown there is no such association.

The study was refuted and ultimately retracted, but the idea that vaccines were risky garnered a tremendous amount of public attention. Students who are now not on campus but planning to take classes on the Urbana campus in the fall should obtain the vaccine as soon as possible from their local provider or pharmacy.

As TIME reported in the October 6, 2014 issue, this is precisely the approach that worked during the mumps outbreak in Columbus, Ohio previous year. After all, the effect of scaring a parent straight may be temporary, but the damage done to a child who contracts a vaccine-preventable disease can be for life. As the number of parents who refuse vaccines has increased, so too have the number of cases of measles.

Brendan Nyhan, an assistant professor of government at Dartmouth College, who did the Pediatrics study, said in an e-mail that the new work was encouraging, but that future research should focus on what the differences were between the two studies. The investigators found that the intervention that involved showing people the consequences of the diseases was the one that had the biggest effect on the people who were initially the most skeptical about vaccinations, Horne said. “That’s the kind of result we were really looking for”. Using images is particularly important in regions where these diseases are no longer common, researchers found.

That was true for even “the most skeptical participants in the study”, Horne said. “In cases like this, pictures might be an especially helpful aid to scientific education”. But a new study claims there is a way to encourage positive attitudes toward vaccination. “The fact that they prevent risky diseases”, Powell said.