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Death or Vaccinations?

My managing editor, Rachael, travels out of the country a lot with her job. She went to a travel immunization company here in Boca Raton this week to get the shots she’d need to venture to some of the poorest countries on the globe – Ethiopia and Haiti.

Seven vaccinations, a whole lot of paperwork and two very sore arms later she called me with some striking news.

“You’ll never guess how many people don’t get shots that could save their lives!!!”

I suspected she was talking about the virtually non-existent immunization system in many developing countries whose people are, as a result, plagued by such preventable diseases as measles and typhoid. But, it turned out she was talking about the U.S.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, up to 5,000 Americans die every year from a disease that can be prevented by vaccination. There are 17 diseases that can be prevented through vaccinations, and several of these…including three fairly new ones licensed since 2005, are recommended specifically for the adult years. But the CDC’s recent National Immunization Survey shows that very low percentages of adults are actually getting these shots that prevent deadly disease.
What’s strange is that routine immunization of children in the U.S. is the norm. The long list of vaccines most children get in their early years has saved thousands of lives and prevented millions of cases of disease. The same could be the case with adults. But as Dr. Anne Schuchat, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, points out, “New data show there are not yet very many adults taking full advantage of the great advancements in prevention that have been made in the past few years.”

The CDC’s recent National Immunization Survey revealed some startling numbers. Only 2.1 percent of adults 18 to 64 are immunized against tetanus-diphtheria-whooping cough. Only 1.9 percent of people 60 and over got the vaccine to prevent shingles…, a disease of which there are more than 1 million new cases in the U.S each year. And vaccine coverage for the prevention of HPV, a three-series shot that prevents several kinds of cervical cancer among women 18 to 26, is about 10 percent. Even the highly publicized influenza and pneumococcal vaccination rates for older people are well below the 90 percent target rates.

Perhaps more jarring than these numbers are the results of another recent national survey done by the National Foundation of Infections Diseases. It showed most adults cannot name more than a couple of diseases in adults that can be prevented by a vaccine, only about 3 to 18 percent could do it. Also disturbing was that half of those surveyed said they are not concerned about whether they or another family member gets a vaccine-preventable disease. Respondents actually expressed the most concern about getting influenza. Doctors say this is because this is the vaccine-preventable disease people hear about the most.

So just what vaccines are adults supposed to get? The list is quite extensive: chickenpox, diphtheria, hepatitis A and B, human papillomavirus (the cervical cancer shot), influenza, measles, meningococcal disease, mumps, whooping cough, pneumococcal disease, rubella, shingles and tetanus.

It sounds like a lot but when you consider the alternative it’s hard to see why people don’t just get their shots. Combined, the infectious diseases I mentioned earlier kill MORE Americans annually than either breast cancer, HIV/AIDS or traffic accidents.

posted by Jason Parsley @ 10:40 AM