Increasing efforts should be made to ensure children get vaccinations to stop rates falling to dangerous levels in England, experts said yesterday.
In some parts of England diphtheria and polio vaccination rates have fallen below 10%, according to the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence.
It warned of the risk of new outbreaks of the disease.
NICE said some vaccination rates have fallen in the last two years.
In spite of improvements in MMR vaccination, only 25% of local authority areas in England last year achieved 95% rates, NICE said.
The guidance said health services should use telephone and texting to contact the parents and carers of children who miss appointments for vaccination.
And it calls for young offenders to be screened to see if they have been vaccinated – as they tend to have low rates of protection.
The guidance also says school nurses and health visitors should check if children have been vaccinated when they start school or college.
Professor Gillian Leng, from NICE, said: “Around three million children and young people may have missed a mumps, measles and rubella vaccine.
“With so many children open to exposure we are at risk of a serious outbreak. This variation in uptake across the country is unacceptable and we need to do more to ensure every child across the country gets the vaccinations they are supposed to. We now need peoples’ views to make sure we have set the right priorities to tackle this variation.
“Vaccinations don’t just protect the people receiving them – vaccination also protects all of us by eliminating infections from the country.”
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