Over the past year, I have watched many children die of measles.

In the final stages, little lungs, filled with fluid and racked with inflammation, struggle for oxygen. The victims breathe faster and faster, gasping for air until, exhausted, they stop.

Where I live, in one of the poorest places on earth, measles kills thousands of children a year. It’s a grim lesson about a disease that should have been eradicated years ago. And it’s a grave warning against assuming “it can’t happen here” in more fortunate countries like the U.S., where the disease is making a comeback as parents fail to take the disease seriously. For years, U.S. pediatricians have gone their entire careers without seeing a case of measles, much less a death. Now, I fear, that may change.

Read more at STAT.

Why would a mother reject safe, potentially lifesaving vaccines for her child?

Popular writing on vaccine skepticism often denigrates white and middle-class mothers who reject some or all recommended vaccines as hysterical, misinformed, zealous or ignorant. Mainstream media and medical providers increasingly dismiss vaccine refusal as a hallmark of American fringe ideology, far-right radicalization or anti-intellectualism.

But vaccine skepticism, and the broader medical mistrust and far-reaching anxieties it reflects, is not just a fringe position.

Read more at The Conversation.

More clinicians need to be discussing the HPV vaccination with their patients and parents, and starting early could improve vaccination rates, according to panelists at a recent National Foundation for Infectious Diseases (NFID) webinar.

Although the CDC reports that more than half of teenagers are up-to-date on the HPV vaccine (Gardasil, Merck) that is used to prevent cervical, anal and other HPV-related cancers, the public health community could be doing better.

“If there was a vaccine for breast cancer, everybody would have it,” said Kimberly Williams, the chief diversity, equity and inclusion officer for Cervivor, a nonprofit bringing cervical cancer survivors together to help raise awareness about the disease.

Read more at Infectious Disease Special Edition.

There were 58 reported cases of measles in the U.S. during all of 2023. But there’s already been 41 cases across 16 states so far this year. The outbreak of this highly contagious virus is cause for concern for many public health departments. Dr. Paul Offit, a pediatrician specializing in virology and immunology at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, joins William Brangham to discuss.

Read more at PBS News Hour.

COVID-19 vaccines have been key to controlling the pandemic, but researchers in Germany report on one man who took the vaccination message to the extreme.

The subject of the research published in Lancet Infectious Diseases is a 62-year-old man from Magdeburg, Germany who claims to have received 217 COVID-19 vaccinations within about 2.5 years. (German prosecutors confirmed he received 130 shots in nine months during an investigation into fraud; ultimately, they did not file criminal charges.)

Read more at Time.

Having Covid-19 increases a person’s risk of developing an autoimmune disease in the year after infection, a large study out of South Korea and Japan reports, but vaccination helps decrease that risk.

Researchers used the medical records of 10 million Korean and 12 million Japanese adults to see whether those who had Covid were more likely to be diagnosed with autoimmune inflammatory rheumatic diseases, or AIRDs, in the year following infection. AIRDs include rheumatoid arthritis, systemic lupus erythematosus, Sjögren syndrome, mixed connective tissue disease, vasculitis, and other conditions. The Covid group was compared with an uninfected control group and a group of patients who had influenza during the same period from 2020 to 2022.

Read more at STAT.

“You don’t count your children until the measles has passed.” Dr. Samuel Katz, one of the pioneers of the first measles vaccine in the late 1950s to early 1960s, regularly heard this tragic statement from parents in countries where the measles vaccine was not yet available, because they were so accustomed to losing their children to measles.

I am a pediatrician and preventive medicine physician, and I have anxiously watched measles cases rise worldwide while vaccination rates have dropped since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic due to disruptions in vaccine access and the spread of vaccine misinformation.

Ream more at The Conversation.

This season’s influenza vaccines have been 42% effective so far, according to a new interim estimate from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, amounting to protection against the virus that appears as good or better than seasons going back to 2016.

First previewed Wednesday at a meeting of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, details of the latest vaccine effectiveness, referred to as VE, estimates were published Thursday in the agency’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. 

“We’re right in the range that we typically see when the vaccine is a good match with the viruses that are circulating. Good VE, and it’s working consistent with past years,” said Sascha Ellington, head of the CDC’s influenza prevention and control team. 

Read more at CBS.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Americans 65 and older should get another dose of the updated vaccine that became available in September — if at least four months has passed since their last shot. In making the recommendation, the agency endorsed guidance proposed by an expert advisory panel earlier in the day.

“Most COVID-19 deaths and hospitalizations last year were among people 65 years and older. An additional vaccine dose can provide added protection … for those at highest risk,” CDC Director Dr. Mandy Cohen said in a statement.

Read more at AP.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is urging doctors to conserve shots of a kind of tetanus vaccine, as the agency braces for a potential shortage of those shots this year.

Doctors should switch from using the so-called Td vaccine – the immunization that protects against both tetanus and diphtheria infections – to giving the broader Tdap vaccine instead whenever possible, the CDC now says. In addition to tetanus and diphtheria, the Tdap vaccine also offers protection against pertussis, the infection also known as “whooping cough.”

This year’s shortage risk stems from a decision by nonprofit vaccinemaker MassBiologics to discontinue production of its Td vaccine, branded as TdVax. 

Read more at CBS.