HealthDay News — North Carolina’s largest chickenpox outbreak in decades is centered in a primary school with a large number of vaccine-exempt students, according to health officials.
Thirty-six students at Asheville Waldorf School were diagnosed with the disease last Friday, according to the Asheville Citizen-Times newspaper, BBC News reported. The school has one of the state’s highest rates of religious-based vaccine exemptions for students.
Of the school’s 152 students, 110 have not received the vaccine against the virus that causes chickenpox, the Citizen-Times reported, according to BBC News. In 2017-18, nearly 68% of the school’s kindergarten students had religious immunization exemptions on file.
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“This is the biggest chickenpox outbreak state health officials are aware of since the vaccine became available,” a state health department spokesman told BBC News in an emailed statement. The school is cooperating with local health officials and is compliant with all state laws, a school spokesperson said.
