This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2015, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
No Western state has a higher vaccination rate than Utah, but still nearly one out of every four babies here has missed at least one immunization.
In light of the measles outbreak that began at Disneyland and stretched into Utah and Arizona, The Washington Post crunched some Centers for Disease Control numbers and found that there's no real geographic trend.
Utah topped the West with a full vaccination rate for a child under 3-years old at 75.2 percent. California's rate is 69.3 percent and Nevada and Arizona are worse than that.
Eight states had a higher rate than Utah, a group that included Pennsylvania, Nebraska and Alabama.
Unimmunized children are still a concern in Utah. At the start of the 2013-2014 school year, 54 of Salt Lake County's 235 public elementary and intermediate schools failed to reach the 95 percent vaccination rate, which experts say is needed to prevent spreading measles and whooping cough.