“In significant part, not because there are more cases of autism, but because we’ve changed the way we evaluate these children and in the way we classify our diagnosis as autistic spectrum disorder,” Stacy said. “For many years, autism was a very narrowly defined diagnosis. And over time, we started including lots of children with developmental disorders that had different labels. And so the term autistic spectrum disorder encompasses a whole host of developmental disorders.”

She said pediatricians have been working hard to identify the children with autism so they can be more aggressive about getting them services.

What the pediatricians said they believe will happen as a result of the current controversy is childhood diseases that can be fatal could come surging back.

That could include measles, with pockets of outbreaks across the country.

Nine states had outbreaks earlier this year, with 64 reported cases between Jan. 1 and April 25 among people from five months old to 71 years old. Fourteen were hospitalized from the outbreaks, although no deaths were reported.

But massive measles outbreaks are still lodged in fairly recent memory, with the last large outbreak in the early 1990s when more than 50,000 were sickened. That resulted in more than 11,000 hospitalizations and 120 deaths.

One out of 17 children with measles gets pneumonia, according to the Centers for Disease Control. For every 1,000 children who get the disease, one or two children will die of it.

Meningitis, swelling of the lining of the brain, can also be contracted by unvaccinated children; also bloodstream infections caused by pneumococcus, deafness caused by mumps and liver cancer caused by hepatitus B virus.

Chickenpox can be serious for children and even more serious for adults. About 50 kids nationally died every year from chicken pox before vaccine was available, with about one in 500 children who got chickenpox hospitalized, according to CDC numbers.

One group of Norman pediatricians, the Norman Pediatric Associates of which Stacy and Kuhls are members, has taken a stronger stand on immunizations.

The NPA physicians, which also includes Dr. Donna Jackson and Dr. Michael Milligan, refuse to accept new patients if parents won’t give the OK for immunizations.

“This office is very passionate about the belief that vaccinations being safe and they are beneficial. And they are necessary to be safe and healthy. Our stance that we choose not to continue to care for children who choose not to get immunizations … is not to be punitive to those families who choose that,” Stacy said. “It’s to protect the other people that are here.”

Jackson said those parents who don’t want to get immunizations have no right to put other children at risk.

“There may be immunodeficient kids in our waiting room. There may be cancer patients,” Jackson said. “All of those are at risk from people who don’t get immunizations. And so we feel like that’s too much of a risk to take.”

Kuhls said the United States has the best system in the world to detect problems with vaccines.