an overall decline in childhood vaccination rates has led to an increase of preventable diseases both here in New Jersey and across the country that issue is a focal point for the state department of health this week as it marks the annual national infant Immunization Week along with World Immunization Week honored every April they're ramping up efforts to inform parents about the importance of keeping up with vaccine appointments for young kids and babies and the role it plays globally as diseases once considered eliminated have made a concerning comeback for more I'm joined by pediatric infectious disease specialist Dr meg Fischer dr fischer good to talk to you i'm thinking about the fact that this week comes with the backdrop that New Jersey is now below herd immunity for diseases like measles which were considered for a long time a thing of the past and are not now how does that factor into this you know week of awareness so it's very important that people really um again realize the importance of vaccines for public health there is no question that New Jersey can protect our children best by getting them immunized and this week is infant immunization week and the best time to start getting your child immunized is right from birth the reason is a baby is born with the mother's protection so whatever your mother's immune to you're immune to for about the first six months of life but that gift isn't the gift that keeps on giving every month you have less protection so it's vital that we get your very young infants immunized to keep them safe not only do we have measles going through the whole country but we also have pertasus which is hooping cough and we've had a couple deaths due to pertasus these are preventable diseases with pertasus although we may not totally prevent disease we can greatly modify it with measles we can prevent the disease by getting your children immunized and protected are those the two main are there other vaccinereventable diseases that we're seeing rear their ugly heads um because vaccination rates are now lower so far those are the two that are happening uh but we know that there are uh bacterial uh diseases homophilus influenza type B and the numacus and when I when I was first training we always had children in the hospital with hemophilus disease it might be uh pneumonia or ear infection or infection in the skin or menitis infection around the brain the vaccine came out back in the uh 80s and 90s and we saw tremendous drop off in the cases of menitis after the hmophilus vaccine we got a vaccine for numacus and right now we rarely rarely see a child with menitis but we know those bacteria are out there so if we don't protect children we absolutely will see them come back so what advice would you have for parents who um are nervous about the symptoms side effects of vaccines and just their general safety obviously we've seen a rise of this since the COVID pandemic yes we certainly have and you know people should have concerns and should be nervous about anything that happens to their child what I would like them to understand is not immunizing is not putting your child at less risk by choosing not to immunize you actually put your child at increased risk and what we all want is we want to protect our children we want to keep them safe we want to keep them healthy and the easiest way is to get them immunized to get them protected now it doesn't mean you shouldn't have questions you should talk to your pediatrician you should find out all the information that you can get and if you have concerns ask your pediatrician get them to un to help you understand what are the true risks and the true benefits and make an informed choice let me ask you about that very quickly in the time we have left what what would you say is the greatest challenge pediatricians are up against right now is it skepticism is it misinformation about vaccines it's both of those uh misinformation has certainly hurt us greatly skepticism i you know I don't worry so much about skepticism because most people are just skeptic if you give them the information and they trust you they're they they will get the vaccines but the misinformation is really hurting our children and is really hurting our pediatricians all right pediatric infectious disease specialist Dr meg Fischer always good to talk to you great to get your insight uh this week thanks for your time oh thank you so much i really appreciate it