Health1 min read

How word of mouth is helping an Amish community's fight against measles

By · Via NPR · Published by Everything Blog

In short

The Chester County Health Department is replacing traditional advertising with home visits to provide measles, mumps, and rubella immunizations directly to families. Outreach workers travel across rural communities to address safety concerns while answering medical questions inside residents' houses. Officials have also forged ties with local businesses, such as Honey Brook Barbecue, to host accessible on-site vaccination clinics. This grassroots approach relies on trusted community spaces and neighbor recommendations to expand preventative care.

Key points

  • House calls and personal conversations are helping overcome community barriers related to…: House calls and personal conversations are helping overcome community barriers related to health insurance and limited medical contact.
  • Partnering with respected church leaders and commercial establishments has enabled public…: Partnering with respected church leaders and commercial establishments has enabled public health staff to set up convenient local immunization sites.
  • Relying on neighbor-to-neighbor recommendations allows healthcare workers to effectively…: Relying on neighbor-to-neighbor recommendations allows healthcare workers to effectively counter vaccine misinformation in populations that avoid conventional healthcare.

Sources checked by our analysis pipeline: 1

Measles spreads incredibly fast. For the last few months, so has Dale Weiser's phone number.

Weiser is the clinical services supervisor for the Chester County Health Department in south-central Pennsylvania. Since August, she's been driving out to Amish homes to vaccinate people against measles. She says it usually starts with a phone call.

"I was at a house, like, at 4:30 in the afternoon, and I had a phone call at 8 the next morning saying, 'hey, I heard you were down the street. Can you come do that at my house?'" she says of a typical request she gets from Amish families. So far, she's administered more than 400 doses of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine in Amish homes.

The house calls are part of the state of Pennsylvania's strategy to wage war on measles by flipping the script on traditional public health messaging. Instead of advertising vaccinations loudly, health officials have launched a quiet word-of-mouth campaign designed to win the trust of the state's Amish community, which has been particularly hard hit by the country's worst measles…

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