Vaccinations

May 19, 2019

Terps draw new fire for staying mostly mum about a fatal viral outbreak

Just as the nation grapples with the worst measles outbreak in a quarter century, the University of Maryland and public health officials are drawing fire for the way they handled the strange confluence of mold infections in dorms and the spread of an contagious virus among students on the College Park campus.

The university and its advisers tried to keep a lid on public information about the dual problems, leading students and parents to assail the school and to blame its sluggish response and silence for the death of an immune-compromised coed.

Her death late last year — following the fall heat-stroke fatality involving Jordan McNair, a 19-year-old football player — has renewed concerns that the university and its staff may lack the expertise, training, and sensitivity to protect vulnerable young people, the Washington Post reported as part of its investigation of the confused health scenario involving Olivia Shea Paregol.

April 29, 2019

Measles outbreaks increase, with cases hitting highest level since 2000

by Patrick A. Malone

Almost two decades after public health officials declared them eradicated from this nation’s children, measles infections have returned with a vengeance to the United States, rising to the highest level in almost two decades, with hundreds of cases in almost two dozen states, and the incidences climbing still.

The outbreaks have been concentrated in New York, in Brooklyn in a religious community, and in Washington state. But authorities have taken aggressive steps, including quarantine orders for hundreds of students and staff on two big college campuses across town from each other (UCLA and Cal State, LA), to ensure that the disease is contained and does not spread in Los Angeles.

Alex Azar, who heads the federal Health and Human Services Department, said in a statement about the familiar infection: “Measles is not a harmless childhood illness, but a highly contagious, potentially life-threatening disease. We have the ability to safely protect our children and our communities. Vaccines are a safe, highly effective public health solution that can prevent this disease. The measles vaccines are among the most extensively studied medical products we have, and their safety has been firmly established over many years in some of the largest vaccine studies ever undertaken.”

April 9, 2019

Concern rises about vaccination exemptions, as infectious diseases spread

by Patrick A. Malone

As outbreaks of preventable infectious diseases rise to concerning levels, doctors, regulators, and lawmakers may need to toughen important laws requiring youngsters to be inoculated, protecting better our collective health and closing off legal loopholes for sketchy vaccination exemptions.

It would be ideal if more than a century of lifesaving experience and decades of rigorous scientific research were sufficient to persuade parents to get their children vaccinated against an array of harmful and dangerous infections. But grownups’ hesitancy or rejection of shots, out of unfounded personal belief or due to medical disinformation, has set in and spread. This has undercut local, national, and global campaigns to rid humanity of contagions like measles. Public information campaigns and evidence-based persuasion hasn’t worked as well as experts might hope, leading officials to pass vaccination laws.

But those protective measures have been eroded by the exploitation by a few, so far, of well-intentioned exemptions, reporters for the independent, nonpartisan Kaiser Health News reported.

March 26, 2019

In battle for science and against anti-vacciners, experts reckon with social media’s sway

by Patrick A. Malone

As doctors and public health officials coast-to-coast battle infectious outbreaks — of measles, mumps, meningitis, whooping cough, influenza, as well as typhus, hepatitis, and TB — the nation is also struggling with the right response for yet another contagion: the viral spread of medical misinformation on social media.

Medical nonsense isn’t new, and savvy patient-consumers long have needed to do a little work to protect themselves from what can be its real and significant harms. But a season of rapidly spreading and 100% preventable infectious diseases has forced modern medicine to confront generational dilemmas with health disinformation that is “shared” widely online and especially via social media.

For the rising generation that now parents youngsters who need and should be vaccinated, social media sites like Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram, as well as information searches via Google have become as ordinary and accepted as once were daily newspapers and the 6 o’clock TV news. But cyber world’s ubiquity also has allowed counter factual, unfounded, nonscientific, and extreme notions to proliferate, as users of all kinds “create content” online. This has fueled the dangerous normalizing and further rise of the anti-vaccination or anti-vaxxer movement.

March 21, 2019

Rise in ‘medieval’ ills and other infections should send a big health warning

by Patrick A. Malone

Americans have battled for at least a decade over the role of government in individuals’ health, specifically through health insurance. But communities across the county may be grappling with the baleful and more direct consequences of society’s ignoring others’ well-being, as a public health crisis erupts over the re-emergence and spread of “medieval diseases.”

Say what you’d like about the vanity and superficiality of Tinsel Town. But it’s no matter for mockery that Los Angeles municipal employees are deathly afraid of and have been infected in the heart of the city’s busy downtown by typhus, a bacterial infection that brings high fever, stomach pain, and chills. It can be treated with antibiotics.

But its outbreak—168 cases since January 2018, including one staffer at Los Angeles City Hall—speaks to significant problems that cities especially are battling with infections borne by vermin, notably rats and the fleas that they carry, as well as lice.

February 11, 2019

Anti-vaxxer nonsense fueling dangerous measles outbreaks, officials fear

by Patrick A. Malone

The 44^th President implored the members of his staff that a key aspect of their collective success could be summarized by a simple notion: Don’t do stupid stuff. If only many more parents nationwide would concur — and shun the anti-scientific nonsense peddled by anti-vaxxers. As the new year advances, public health officials across the country are battling measles outbreaks, dozens of reported cases in the Pacific Northwest (Washington and Oregon) and in New York City.

The concern is rising because disease carriers are increasing in their number and mobility in areas where populations may be especially vulnerable due to low vaccination rates. Public health officials have likened the situation to “tossing a match into a can of gasoline,” or a disease spread “like a wildfire.”

As the New York Times reported of the risks this childhood infection poses: “Measles can cause permanent neurological damage, deafness and in relatively rare cases, death.”

November 9, 2018

Big Pharma shows off its big gall with risky products and dubious practices

by Patrick A. Malone

Big Pharma is a broad commercial sector with many diverse enterprises large and small, but they keep showing they’re united in their giant gall when it comes to their unacceptable products and practices, as timely news reports demonstrate.

Just consider:

As the nation grapples with an overdose epidemic that kills tens of thousands of Americans annually, why would the firm AcelRx race to market — and why would federal regulators approve — a new opioid painkiller? Experts warn the drug is incredibly powerful and so tiny and easy to use that it fast will be much abused and lethal. The new pill, Dsuvia, is just 3 millimeters in diameter — the size of a big grain of sand. Placed under the tongue, it delivers its dose almost as soon as it dissolves. It is said to pack 10 times the potency of an already deadly synthetic painkiller: fentanyl, which is up to 100 times more potent than morphine and many times that of heroin.

October 1, 2018

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

by Patrick A. Malone

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.”