Vaccinations

October 1, 2018

Why should we all get flu shots? 80,000 deaths, including 180 kids, in 2017

Although shots carry their own risks, just as any medical treatment does, new data from 2017’s killer flu season shows the folly of patients ignoring influenza’s wrath and skipping the vaccination for it. Youngsters and seniors, especially, need to get these inoculations.

The federal Centers for Disease and Control reported that 80,000 Americans died last winter due to the flu, the infectious disease’s highest toll in 40 years, far exceeding the previous peak of 56,000 such deaths recorded decades earlier.

Youngsters were hit hard in the most recent season, as the Washington Post reported:

September 4, 2018

Sex gets riskier as syphilis, gonorrhea, and chlamydia cases spike for fourth year

by Patrick A. Malone

Although Americans may be having less sex, it’s getting riskier than ever, with the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reporting that new cases of chlamydia, gonorrhea, and syphilis spiked for the fourth consecutive year in 2017 to a record high of nearly 2.3 million diagnoses.

“We are sliding backward,” Jonathan Mermin, a doctor and director of CDC’s National Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and TB Prevention, said in a statement. “It is evident the systems that identify, treat, and ultimately prevent STDs are strained to near-breaking point.”

The sustained increases in the three common forms of sexually transmitted diseases worry public health officials for multiple reasons, not the least of which is that the infections, untreated, can result in infertility or pregnancy complications and increase the risk of HIV transmission.

July 13, 2018

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

by Patrick A. Malone

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.