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Amish polio cases raise concerns

By Robert Rhodes
Mennonite Weekly Review

ST. PAUL, Minn. — A polio outbreak in a central Minnesota Amish community has health officials looking for ways to convince more plain people to take immunization shots.

Though no one has become ill from the outbreak — the first time polio has surfaced in the United States since 1979, when an international outbreak also affected the Amish and other plain groups — five Amish children from Todd County have contracted the polio infection. Three of the children, ages 5 to 14, are from the same family.

Minnesota state epidemiologist Harry Hull said Oct. 31 that the state health department now faces the challenging task of encouraging more people to overcome their fears about immunization — the only sure line of defense against a broader, more dangerous outbreak.

“What we’re hoping is that we can head this off at the pass before it gets into [general society],” Hull said, noting that only about one in 200 people who contract the polio infection suffer the disease’s ravaging paralysis.

So far, immunization appeals among the Amish have met with some success, Hull said. Out of 24 Amish families in the community where the polio turned up, near Clarissa, about a third had been vaccinated previously, Hull said, and others have agreed to take the vaccine.

In another Amish community in southern Minnesota, near the Iowa border, Hull said as many as 500 people are expected to receive the immunizations in coming days following an appeal in that area.

Hull said health department personnel have been lobbying for the vaccines by first approaching local Amish church leaders, who have been leaving the choice to individual families.

In some Amish settlements, Hull said, workers have been going door-to-door, to ensure that no pressure is exerted on families by others who object to immunization.

“It’s been a very individualized approach,” Hull said. “There are a fair number of Amish who are immunized already . . . so you get into lots of subtleties here.”

Sociologist Donald Kraybill of Elizabethtown (Pa.) College, said there are no official prohibitions among the Amish against immunization. Instead, he said, some oppose the practice out of a combination of fear, ignorance and religious zeal.

“It’s more rural conservatism or caution,” Kraybill said Oct. 31. “Some of it is just sort of rural neglect or fear of the unknown. These are people who haven’t studied any science in high school.”

Kraybill said in Lancaster County, Pa., Amish schoolteachers maintain immunization records on their students, as well as offering a form to be signed by families opposed to their children receiving vaccinations.

Kraybill said one Amish clinician, who works in an Amish pediatric practice, said as many as two-thirds of the Amish children in the Lancaster area are vaccinated.

This high percentage, Kraybill said, may be attributed in part to the 1979 polio outbreak, which Hull said started in Europe before spreading to North America and beyond.

In Canada and the United States, the 1979 outbreak had a significant impact on several Amish, Mennonite and Hutterite communities where immunization was frowned upon, Hull said.

But after 1979, Kraybill said, Amish leaders in the Lancaster area became more supportive of vaccine programs.

This also is the case in more progressive Amish communities where there is more openness to modern medicine, Kraybill said, or in parts of Indiana, where Amish children attend public schools and are required by law to be immunized.

“A lot of it relates to fear about the vaccination process,” Kraybill said. “They’re not sure what’s in the vaccine.”

Others, Kraybill said, “would feel that your health is more in God’s hands. But that would certainly not be the prevailing atttude.”