Article in Japanese

Reasons why infants had not been vaccinated with BCG

Masamichi NISHIMURA¹⁾

We retrospectively evaluated to clarify the reasons why infants had not received BCG vaccination within the recommended age, as to find a way to improve vaccination rate. BCG vaccination against Tuberculosis is routine in infants less than one year old. This study extracted unvaccinated infants in A city B district between May 2013 and April 2014. They had not been vaccinated with BCG at 10 months of age.
The parents were contacted and asked why their infants had not been vaccinated. In addition, BCG vaccination was recommended before the infants reached 1 year old. Of 26 infants found to be unvaccinated with BCG, 9 were later vaccinated, while the other 17 cases remained without vaccination.
The reasons why 17 infants had not been vaccinated were due to the beliefs of the parents (8 cases), instructions from doctors (2 cases), recurring colds or wheezing (2 cases), plans to have the baby vaccinated later (2 cases), moving to an area with lower morbidity (1 case), fear of side effects (1 case) and eczema of the upper arm (1 case).
Six out of the 8 cases refusing BCG vaccination through the "beliefs" of parents had not received any kind of vaccine.
Promoting the vaccination rate in Japan may be limited to improving the methods and timing when recommending vaccination.

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1) Kawasaki Tama Public Health Center

Key words
Received	February 10, 2016
Accepted	July 7, 2016

28 (3)：167─172,2016