Report Summary


Introduction

Immunization remains a safe and effective method of preventing illness in adolescents and stopping disease transmission in the community. The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) provides a vaccine schedule to achieve protection against diphtheria, tetanus, acellular pertussis, meningococcal disease, human papillomavirus, and influenza. ACIP also recommends that adolescents catch up on incomplete polio, measles, mumps, rubella, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, and varicella childhood immunizations1. This report summarizes immunization coverage for adolescents who were aged 13 through 17 years in the second quarter of 2022.

Methods

All immunization records and demographic data for children born between April 01, 2005 and June 30, 2009 were obtained from the Georgia Registry of Immunization Transactions and Services (GRITS). Records from out-of-state residents and placeholder records (those created for unnamed children at birth) were removed, resulting in 960,995 records. Each immunization record was evaluated using the ACIP 1:3:2:3:2:12 catch-up schedule. The catch-up schedule provides the minimum age and the shortest acceptable interval between immunizations. This allows us to identify adolescents who were vaccinated appropriately but outside the recommended schedule due to missed vaccines, travel, contraindications, or other unknown reasons. If all doses of a vaccine (e.g., all 3 of the IPV doses) were correctly administered by 18 years, the adolescent was considered up-to-date (UTD) on that vaccine.

Coverage was further examined by race, ethnicity, insurance status, district, and county.

Differences from Past Studies

Previous adolescent immunization studies used a cross-sectional study design where private and public schools were sampled from each district. From these schools, a number of 7th grade students were randomly sampled Georgia’s Immunization Regional Consultants (IRCs) collected identifying information and vaccination history from school 3231 files for the selected students and input them into an electronic web-based data collection system. This system interfaced with GRITS to extract vaccination data.

Limitations

Some immunization records have multiple addresses associated with them, either because of multiple parents/guardians listed or because old and new addresses are contained in the record. In these cases, the first complete Georgia address was used to assign county of residence. Children may not have received all vaccines while living at one address or at the assigned address. In cases where there was no address, the child was assumed to be a Georgia resident and county was left as “unknown.” Due to the volume of records, it is not feasible to individually determine correct addresses, and therefore county- and district-level coverage are estimates.

Key Findings

Overall, Georgia’s immunization coverage for the complete 1:3:2:3:2:1 series was 51.0%. By individual vaccines, coverage was highest for Hepatits B (HepB) at 94.2% and lowest for Human papillomavirus (HPV) all genders at 37.1%. By race, coverage for the complete 1:3:2:3:2:1 series was highest among Other Race at 61.6% and lowest among Unknown at 15.9%. By ethnicity, coverage for the complete 1:3:2:3:2:1 series was highest among Hispanic or Latino at 59.2% and lowest among Unknown at 27.2%. By district, coverage for the complete 1:3:2:3:2:1 series was highest in District 10 Athens at 59.5% and lowest in Unknown at 33.9%.

Footnotes

1 https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/schedules/hcp/imz/child-adolescent.html

2 1 tetanus, diphtheria, & acellular pertussis (Tdap) dose, 3 inactivated polio virus (IPV) doses, 2 measles, mumps, rubella (MMR) doses, 3 hepatitis B doses, 2 varicella doses, 1 meningococcal conjugate vaccine for serogroups A, C, W, and Y (MenACWY)

Using Buttons in this Report:

Click the “Report Sections Drop-Down” button to view and navigate to the different sections of the report. In the “Georgia Totals” and “Georgia Totals Overtime” sections, you can interact with the graphs. Click and drag to zoom in and double click to return to the default view. In the “Georgia Totals Overtime” section, you can also click the name of the vaccine in the legend to remove it from the graph, which can be helpful when lines overlap. In all the other report sections, there are buttons at the top to download the data into various formats. Copy will copy the chart onto your clipboard so you can paste it into other documents. You can download the data from the report section as CSV, Excel, or PDF with their respective buttons. Print will open the print menu so you can print a physical copy. In the “Data by District” and “Data by County” sections, you can use the search bar to limit the table to a particular district or county.

Georgia Totals

Georgia Totals Overtime

Data by Race

Data by Ethnicity

Data by Insurance Coverage

Data by District

Data by County