Vaccinations

July 13, 2018

For women, more reasons to consider HPV test, while fertility rates decline

Women and their doctors may need to give even more consideration to a test for the human papilloma virus (HPV) because research increasingly shows that it detects precancerous cervical changes sooner and better than the long used and widely accepted Pap smear.

The latest findings on the HPV test’s benefits could lead to improvements in women’s reproductive health, even at a time when experts are seeing sharp declines in American female fertility rates and getting more insights into why US women are having fewer babies. And it may lead more experts to urge women to drop “co-testing,” both the HPV test and the Pap smear.

Researchers in Canada’s British Columbia potentially gave the HPV test one of its more significant boosts with a randomized clinical trial involving more than 19,000 women and following them for four years or so. Their newly published results showed that “there were significantly more cases of precancerous lesions detected early in the trial among the women in the HPV-tested group, compared with the Pap cytology group,” the Washington Post reported. Further, “there were fewer cases of precancer in the HPV test group, compared with the Pap smear group. That’s because cases of worrisome cellular changes already had been detected and dealt with after the women were first screened.”

February 27, 2018

As tens of thousands seek flu care, a warning on hospital-acquired pneumonia

by Patrick A. Malone

As tens of thousands of Americans flood hospitals for treatment during the current flu epidemic, some also may end up sicker than when admitted, notably due to an infectious disease that’s a persistent and increasing worry for caregiving institutions: pneumonia.

The Wall Street Journal — citing federal statistics that pneumonia is the leading hospital acquired infection (HAI), sickening more than 150,000 patients annually in acute care hospitals — has highlighted new research showing that the disease is more common and problematic than now recognized.

Doctors and hospitals may have thought pneumonia struck mostly among elderly patients and those in intensive care units, particularly those needing ventilators and other machinery to assist their breathing. But the disease, “occurs across all units in all types and sizes of U.S. hospitals, putting every patient—the young included—at higher risk for developing the infection,” the researchers concluded after examining data on more than 1,300 patients at 21 hospitals.

February 1, 2018

Yes, an ounce of prevention is still worth a pound of cure

by Patrick A. Malone

Preventive measures, even small ones, can be life changing and lifesaving. They can safeguard drivers and passengers in car wrecks, protect young folks during a bad flu season, and ensure that fewer Americans still take up one of the proven, major health harms — smoking.

Let’s start with a simple, often overlooked vehicular precaution: Buckle up that seat belt, please. As New York Times columnist David Leonhardt noted in a recent Opinion section roundup, the number of Americans killed on the roads who fail to wear vehicle restraints, notably seat belts, has hovered “between 48 percent and 51 percent in each of the past five years.”

Yes, that’s a correct figure: Roughly half of those killed didn’t use one of the most publicized, almost reflexive safety steps around.

January 18, 2018

President O? Let’s first look hard at her role in hyping health humbug

by Patrick A. Malone

Oprah Winfrey’s recent rousing broadcast speech — both in accepting an entertainment industry group’s lifetime achievement award and denouncing sexism and sexual harassment in Hollywood — also opened the door to a reconsideration of how this talented, smart, accomplished, powerful, and wealthy celebrity icon long has helped to foster a barrage of health and medical humbug, spreading it far and wide in popular culture.

As Stat, a health and information site, recapped about Winfrey:

She connected a cancer patient to ‘junk science,’ a Washington Post analysis says. She promoted charlatans on her show, according to Slate. Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee put out a statement … attacking Winfrey for ‘giving a platform to anti-vaccination campaigners and other dangerous health quackery.’

January 16, 2018

As flu season rages, please get vaccinated and take other precautions

by Patrick A. Malone

The flu season’s roaring across the country. It’s a bad one, with the H3N2 strain afflicting millions with a severe form of illness — which also has been deadly, notably for the old and young.

If you haven’t done so, consider getting a flu shot, asap. The flu shot this year may be less than optimal in the protections it may offer. Still, as Aaron Carroll — a professor of pediatrics at Indiana University School of Medicine who blogs on health research and policy at The Incidental Economist — argues in a New York Times “Upshot” column, the benefits of inoculation are still clear and pronounced.

As he writes:

May 19, 2017

A million-dollar lie: anti-vaxxers faulted in Minn. measles outbreak

by Patrick A. Malone

Call it the million-dollar lie: Minnesotans are finding how costly it can be to allow vaccination foes to spread counter-factual misinformation in vulnerable populations. Doing so has helped fuel one of the North Star state’s worst recent outbreaks of measles among international refugees in the Twin Cities area. The highly contagious infection has swept through the state’s sizable community of Somali immigrants, felling several dozen children, most younger than 10 and all but two un-immunized.

Public health officials blame the disease’s surge, which they say has not peaked yet and has resulted in kids sick enough to need hospitalization, on anti-vaxxers’ exploitation of immigrants’ uninformed fears about American medicine, particularly modern science’s inability to explain precisely what causes autism.

To be crystal clear, no evidence or science ties vaccines to autism. But almost a decade ago, shortly after the government, churches, and nonprofits helped many Somalis—who were fleeing famine and strife in their native African nation and resettling legally in Minnesota—a public health scare erupted. The newcomers feared then that disproportionate numbers of their children were showing signs they were autistic. Health officials investigated and found no higher incidence of the developmental disorder.

April 14, 2017

Experts find cancer-causing HPV a widely spread infection among U.S. adults

by Patrick A. Malone

More Americans ages 18 to 59 may be infected with the human papilloma virus (HPV) than previously had been known, with 1 in 4 men and 1 in 5 women carrying high-risk strains, federal experts say.

The new findings from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may become a key part of campaigns to get more parents to vaccinate youngsters against HPV infections. They have been found to cause cervical cancer and have been tied to cancers of the throat, anus, and male and female reproductive organs.

HPV-related cancers are on the rise, and it is concerning that the CDC found that almost half of Americans’ are infected. But public health leaders have confronted ignorance and adult prudery—by physicians, public officials, and parents—as they try to get boys and girls, ages 11 and 12, inoculated and protected against the virus.

March 14, 2017

Public health, preventive care programs may take billion-dollar hit

by Patrick A. Malone

When it comes to the nation’s health, the Trump Administration and the GOP-dominated Congress seem determined to prove they know how to do penny-wise and pound-foolish. They’re amply demonstrating this with proposed slashes in the nation’s basic budget for public health. They’re calling for a $1 billion cut for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, notably in the agency’s funding to combat bioterrorism and outbreaks of disease, as well as to battle smoking and to provide critical medical services like immunizations. Their target is the Prevention and Public Health Fund, set up under the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare. With the ACA under fire by partisans who want to repeal and replace it, the fund was already imperiled. GOP lawmakers, determined to cut domestic spending, seem disinclined to come up with substitute sums.

Andy Harris, a Maryland Republican congressman, physician, and House appropriations health subcommittee member, has been quoted as calling the public health money, “a slush fund.” He argued that, “It’s been used by the secretary [of health and human services] for whatever the secretary wants. It’s a misnomer to call it the Prevention and Public Health Fund, because it’s been used for other things, and it’s about time we eliminated it.”

The Obama Administration did embarrass Congress by tapping the fund to provide emergency aid last summer to Florida, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and other states battling tropical infections, including Zika and dengue fever. Congress took a long recess vacation, as states clamored for help for mosquito eradication and vaccine development to deal with Zika, a virus that can cause severe birth defects and other harms.

January 16, 2017

In Cleveland and in DC, a new outbreak of ridiculousness on vaccinations

by Patrick A. Malone

In 1798, Edward Jenner, an English physician, published a small pamphlet that forever changed the course of medicine. The pamphlet described how vaccinations could prevent infectious diseases. But more than two centuries after his lifesaving breakthrough, which has sidelined some of the planet’s worst scourges, how is it that a leading physician at one of the nation’s top academic medical centers, a scion of a legendary American political family, and the U.S. president-elect all can raise public doubts — without basis in science or evidence — about modern inoculations and their demonstrable health benefit?

Vaccines, to be sure, carry risks. So do all medical treatments. Some proponents may overstate their effectiveness. Their harms and benefits have been studied extensively by credible experts, and that research continues. It’s published and available, often online for free. What’s beyond issue is that vaccinations protect the public health, and the evidence for their widespread, consistent, and sustained use is beyond debate. For inoculations to reach their maximum effectiveness, it’s vital, of course, that more not less of us get them to build and maintain “herd immunity.”

We’re almost two decades past the fraud, refutation, and retraction of a rotten medical journal article that utterly misrepresented scientific research about some vaccines. Its harms live on, including when its fabulist views find echoes in a Cleveland newspaper blog post by an M.D. at the notable Cleveland Clinic, or when the incoming leader of the free world engages in another of his dumpster-fire quality meetings with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., both disputing later as to whether it will result in a new presidential panel reexamining vaccinations. The Washington Post underscores that such a panel already exists, and, by the way, Stat, the online health information site, has provided a short, informative look at how the president can affect vaccinations.

September 23, 2016

Candidates’ health circus offers a rational reminder: need a pneumonia shot?

by Patrick A. Malone

The news circus about the health of presidential candidates gives us a good excuse to mention a smart preventive care measure for both very young and older Americans: vaccination against pneumonia.