Status: 02/23/2022 5:38 p.m
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STIKO recommends several vaccinations for children, including against measles and rubella. Although children are apparently vaccinated more frequently against these diseases, the rate is still only a good 50 percent.
Apparently, more parents than before are having their children vaccinated against diseases such as measles and whooping cough. This is the result of a current report by Techniker Krankenkasse (TK), which only included data from children insured there.
According to this, 51.9 percent of the children born in the first half of 2019 received all vaccinations recommended by the Standing Vaccination Commission (STIKO) by their second birthday. For children born in 2016, the vaccination rate was 46.7 percent.
Conversely, however, this also means that almost half of the children remain without the full recommended vaccination protection. the STIKO list includes several vaccinationsincluding measles and whooping cough as well as rubella, polio and chickenpox.
The rate of completely unvaccinated children fell: from 3.5 percent to 2.8 percent.
Less medication prescribed for children
According to the report, significantly fewer medications were prescribed to TK-insured children during the corona pandemic. In 2020, children under the age of twelve were prescribed almost 40 percent fewer medications than in 2019.
The prescription of antipyretics such as paracetamol and ibuprofen has dropped sharply: while before the pandemic, 45 percent of children were prescribed such a drug at least once a year, in the first year of the pandemic it was only 29 percent. Prescriptions for certain antibiotics also fell sharply, for example by almost two-thirds for amoxicillin.
Childhood illnesses are on the decline
TK sees the reason for this development in the corona protection measures. Because of the hygiene measures, daycare and school closures, the number of typical childhood illnesses has also decreased.
However, the trend of declining prescriptions for children is not entirely new – TK observed a slight decline even before the pandemic.
Prescribed more psychiatric drugs
In contrast, psychotropic drugs were prescribed more frequently in 2020. Prescriptions for younger children between the ages of six and eleven increased by a slight 0.3 percent, and for older children between the ages of twelve and 17 by 0.8 percent. The most common were antidepressants and medication for ADHD.
According to the TK data, there were major differences: boys were prescribed medication for ADHD three times as often as girls. The opposite is true for antidepressants, which are prescribed to girls more than two and a half times as often as to boys.
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