Why 9% of parents of children from 0 to 4 years did not give their children the mandatory vaccines – Bulgaria

In Bulgaria at the moment about 9% of parents of children of age from 0 to 4 years they haven’t put all of them compulsory vaccinations of their children. This tendency is weaker when it comes to another, older child in the family.

That’s what they show the results of a nationally representative survey on the attitudes of parents and general practitioners towards the National Immunization Calendar for 2023. The survey was conducted by the sociological agency “Global Metrix” at the initiative of Ministry of Health and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) among 1,002 parents of children under 4 years of age and 350 general practitioners with children in their practice, UNICEF reported.

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In the studied population, for parents who also have another child over the age of 4, the share of unvaccinated children is about 4%. The study does not allow us to conclude whether this is a signal of a trend towards an increase in the proportion of unvaccinated children, or whether it is age-specific in the choice of parents, but it is an indication that unvaccinated children in the 0–4 year group are more compared to the group 4–18 years

In our country, more than half of the parents to children from 0 to 4 years support compulsory immunization. A total of 61% of parents support compulsory vaccines and would give all or even additional vaccines to your children.

According to the research there is a trend towards an increase in the share of parentswho at their own discretion refuse the mandatory immunization of their children. A large number of parents decided to stop the implementation of the mandatory vaccination calendar after the administration of a certain vaccine (32.2%).

Over 77% of parents define doctors as main source of information on vaccine issues, and 95% of general practitioners (GPs) advise parents to vaccinate their children with all vaccines from the mandatory immunization calendar.

According to general practitioners, participated in the study, the main reasons parents give for their decision not to vaccinate their children, is the worry that vaccines cause autism (18.4%). The next two most frequently cited reasons are concerns about side effects (15.8%) and about harmful ingredients in vaccine content (14.5%).

According to UNICEF, in the last three years more than 1.8 million children in the European Region of the World Health Organization (WHO) missed their measles vaccination. The consequence of this is a 60-fold increase in the number of measles cases in 2023 compared to 2022, including in some of Bulgaria’s neighboring countries, making the country vulnerable to the side effects of migration, for example.

In recent days, nearly two hundred confirmed cases of whooping cough have been registered in Bulgaria, and the epidemiological forecasts are for their number to increase to a thousand in the next month, notes UNICEF.

There are 38 children under the age of one who are sick with whooping cough, said yesterday Dr. Kremena Parmakova, head of the “Infectious Diseases Control” department at the Ministry of Health. Within a month, there will be at least a thousand people with whooping cough, commented Prof. Iva Hristova, director of the National Center for Infectious and Parasitic Diseases.

The Ministry of Health will allow the first immunization against whooping cough to be administered as early as a month and a half after birth, the Acting Prime Minister Dimitar Glavchev, the Minister of Health Dr. Galya Kondeva, the Deputy Minister of Education and Science Emilia Lazarova and the main one state health inspector Assoc. Angel Kunchev.

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