[FlameOn]

Things are escalating. Now a US parent of a kid with leukemia is trying to get unvaccinated kids banned from school.

In the latest salvo in the vaccination wars that have shaken California since a measles outbreak originated at Disneyland last month, the father of a 6-year-old boy with leukemia has asked the superintendent of his Marin County school district to keep unvaccinated children out of school.

“I respect people’s choices about what to do with their kids, but if someone’s kid gets sick and gets my kid sick, too, that’s a problem,” said the father, Carl Krawitt of Corte Madera, Calif., whose son, Rhett, was found to have leukemia in 2010. “What we need to do, for all our children, is increase the herd immunity.”

Rhett is in remission now, but four years of chemotherapy have left him vulnerable to infection and unable to be vaccinated. Until his immune system strengthens, his best protection from infectious diseases is the so-called herd immunity of a community where almost everyone has been vaccinated.

But he lives in a part of the Bay Area where an unusually high number of parents refuse vaccinations for their children. Over all, about 7 percent of the children at Rhett’s school, Reed Elementary, are unvaccinated — a rate that is higher than the statewide average but far lower than at some other schools in the county, where fully half of the students are not vaccinated, according to Dr. Matt Willis, the county health officer.

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