UNITY® Consortium, a non-profit organization focused on preventive health and immunization for adolescents and young adults, is urging parents and young people to Stay on TASK during Adolescent Immunization Action Week (AIAW), April 1-5, 2024. AIAW is a national movement aimed at parents, adolescents and healthcare providers to ensure adolescents are up to date on well visits and recommended vaccines. Across the nation, organizations interested in the health of adolescents are participating in AIAW to help protect adolescents from vaccine-preventable illnesses.
How many lives do vaccines save?
Have you ever heard of smallpox? It’s a dangerous disease that once killed millions of children and left many others scarred for life. Thanks to the first vaccine ever developed, smallpox is now gone from our planet! Scientists have developed vaccines against many other infectious diseases, including COVID-19. As a result of routine vaccination programs for children, most of us are now protected from dangerous diseases, such as measles and rubella. Even better, when enough people in the population have immunity against a disease, the rest of the population is also protected. This is called herd immunity.
Organizations like the World Health Organization and Gavi (the Vaccine Alliance) support vaccination activities in countries around the world. With their support, during the last decades immunization in many countries has expanded. But how many lives have vaccination programs saved? Will they continue to save lives in the years to come? This is what we wanted to find out.
Measles outbreaks show the risks of under-vaccination
On March 18, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a health alert warning clinicians and public health officials of a global rise in measles cases. Yonatan Grad, professor of immunology and infectious diseases at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, discusses the highly transmissible disease and what may be driving its resurgence.
A Look at Just a Few Women and Their Work in the Greatest Public Health Achievement of All Time
It’s no secret, vaccines are a powerhouse in protecting public health. In fact, vaccines prevent 4-5 million deaths worldwide each year! What’s lesser known is the powerhouse role women have played in the history of vaccine development, administration, and uptake. Women have been instrumental in what is largely considered the greatest public health achievement of all time. This Women’s History Month, let’s take a look at just a few:
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who lived from 1689 to 1762, was a British author and poet. Her husband served as the British ambassador to Turkey. It was in Turkey where Montagu noticed women who seemed to evade smallpox, lacking the telltale scars from infection on their skin. She learned from them the practice of inoculation, which involved making small cuts in the skin and placing small amounts of liquid infected with smallpox in the cuts. She even inoculated her son while there. In 1721 upon returning to Britain, there was a severe smallpox outbreak. She inoculated her daughter and shared the practice with physicians. Word spread, and others also successfully inoculated their own children. However, not unlike today, she found herself amid misinformation about the practice of inoculation and was ridiculed. She did not know it at the time, but the practice she brought from Turkey would be key to Edward Jenner’s smallpox vaccine 75 years later. Jenner, who was inoculated as a child with this method, recognized that dairymaids who contracted cowpox seemed to be immune from smallpox. Hypothesizing that the two illnesses were related, Jenner employed the same method Montagu brought from Turkey using fluid from cowpox to inoculate people against smallpox. It is much thanks to Montagu that Jenner developed the smallpox vaccine. Today, people no longer get smallpox; it is the only disease to have been successfully eradicated from the globe.
Henrietta Lacks
At age 31 in the early 1950s, Henrietta Lacks sought care for what was diagnosed as cervical cancer. She received treatment at Johns Hopkins Hospital – one of the only places that would treat Black people during that time. During her treatment, doctors took samples of her cells without her or her family’s knowledge; consent was not required at that time. While Lacks died shortly after her diagnosis, her cells had a unique ability to survive and reproduce. Applied in the development of the polio vaccine, genetic mapping, cancer research, and even COVID-19 vaccines, the cells have proven key to many modern medical innovations. They continue to be used today and are known as “HeLa” cells.
Rosalynn Carter and Betty Bumpers
After having worked to increase vaccination uptake in Georgia and Arkansas, respectively, Former First Lady, Rosalynn Carter, and Former First Lady of Arkansas, Betty Bumpers joined together in 1991 amid a measles outbreak in the U.S. to form Every Child By Two (now known as Vaccinate Your Family). The two women traveled across the country to help bolster vaccination uptake nationally and help build immunization coalitions across the U.S. Bumpers and Carter are responsible for laws mandating school immunizations, and the coalitions they helped form positively impact pro-vaccination policies nationwide. Policies promoting immunization uptake and state vaccination requirements for school entry safeguard both students and faculty alike in an environment where the likelihood for disease transmission is high.
Kizzmekia Corbett-Helaire, PhD
When the COVID-19 pandemic broke amid a race against time and a mounting death toll, Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett-Helaire and her team at the National Institute of Health would spend countless hours developing what would become the Moderna mRNA vaccine. Having studied coronaviruses for over five years, Corbett-Helaire built on her previous research which determined spike proteins to be the key to coronavirus vaccines. Aside from this work, Corbett-Helaire stands as a role model for other aspiring women of color, allowing them to see themselves as leaders in the field of science.
This list includes just a few of the countless women who have made a difference in the vaccine world. We could never include them all in just one blog post! Immunize Colorado celebrates all the women involved in elevating the essential role vaccines play in preventing illness and promoting healthy communities in Colorado and beyond! To learn more about the roles women have played in vaccine history, check out The women who made modern vaccines work and Vaccines and Women’s History Month.
Immunize Colorado was formed in 1991 in response to alarmingly low vaccination rates across the state. At the time, only about 50% of Colorado’s children were adequately vaccinated. A group of physicians and other concerned individuals came together to strategize how to protect Coloradans from vaccine-preventable diseases and increase vaccine uptake. Much work remains. Discover ways to support our commitment to healthy Colorado communities or make a donation today!
ERs Might Be Good Spots to Offer Flu Shots
New research offers an easy prescription to get people to roll up their sleeves for a flu shot.
Just ask them to.
And then reinforce the invitation with a little video and print encouragement.
“Our study adds to the growing body of knowledge showing that a number of important public health interventions can and should be delivered to underserved populations in emergency departments,” said first author Dr. Robert Rodriguez, a professor of emergency medicine at the University of California-San Francisco.
After four years with Covid-19, the US is settling into a new approach to respiratory virus season
With the arrival of spring, the United States is easing out of respiratory virus season, a familiar pattern that has been challenged by Covid-19 for the past four years.
The addition of a novel germ has complicated and expanded respiratory virus season, which was already notoriously difficult to predict. This season had its own unique set of circumstances as public health balanced a significant transition out of the public health emergency with efforts to find a sustainable way forward.
The Vaccine Doctors Want Every Single Person Over 65 to Get ASAP
You’ve probably gotten your flu shot, the latest COVID jab and maybe the shingles vaccine. But, there’s another shot that you should add to your health to-do list if you’re over 65: the pneumococcal vaccine.
The pneumococcal vaccine targets pneumococcal disease, a bacteria-causing infection that can lead to several different conditions, from sinusitis to meningitis. Older adults are at a high risk of serious illness and even death from the disease, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
CDC, AMA Issue Calls to Get Vaccinated Against Measles
Two of America’s leading health organizations are highlighting a global rise in measles cases as yet another reason for families to make sure they get the measles vaccine.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Medical Association (which represents the nation’s doctors), each issued advisories on Monday stressing the need for vaccination.
Besides a total of 58 known cases of measles in the United States, “many countries, including travel destinations such as Austria, the Philippines, Romania, and the United Kingdom, are experiencing measles outbreaks,” the CDC said in a statement.
COVID paved the way for a new vaccine era
The unprecedented success of the COVID-19 vaccines has elevated the mRNA platform and raised expectations the technology could soon be wielded against other infectious diseases.
The big picture: COVID is still the only disease for which any mRNA vaccines are approved, but dozens more are being developed and tested against the flu, RSV, HIV and even cancer.
Between the lines: Scientists had been working on mRNA vaccines for decades, but the technology, which essentially provides instructions to the immune system, got a significant boost when Pfizer’s and Moderna’s COVID vaccines were developed and brought to market at a record pace.
U.S. measles milestone: 60 cases so far in 2024 — more than all of 2023
The U.S. has now tallied at least 60 confirmed or suspected measles cases investigated so far this year by authorities in 17 states — more than the 58 cases reported nationwide in all of 2023. It comes as health officials are grappling with multiple major outbreaks of the highly contagious virus around the world.
Now with spring break travel looming, health officials have ramped up pleas for Americans to double check whether they are up to date on the highly effective vaccines used to protect against measles.
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