There’s been a lot of talk about kids’ vaccines these past couple of years. While many of those conversations not surprisingly surrounded the new COVID-19 vaccines, it’s important to remember all of the other recommended immunizations for children from birth through adolescence. It’s a lot to keep track of, though, and with everything else you’re juggling — hello, mental workload of motherhood — it’s possible to fall behind schedule or occasionally miss an immunization appointment. So, how bad is that, really? Does the standard pediatric vaccine schedule leave any wiggle room for catching up? Fortunately, staying up-to-date doesn’t have to be as overwhelming as it may seem.

Immunizations like those that can prevent measles have been studied for decades, and carefully planned schedules have been created to lower children’s risks of infection. Pediatricians around the globe agree — including those we spoke to recently, who shared their advice on the importance of immunization schedules and what to do if you miss a vaccine appointment.

Read more at Scary Mommy.

More than 90% of kids infected with measles in the Columbus area were unvaccinated, raising alarm as vaccination rates slip around the country.

A measles outbreak among dozens of unvaccinated children in Ohio has local health officials concerned about a deepening distrust of vaccines among some parents. With vaccination rates slipping around the country, more Americans are beginning to question the value of vaccine requirements for kids ― putting at risk a growing group of young children with no immunity to the virus.

Decades-old wariness of the measles vaccine ― based on well-funded false claims about a nonexistent link to autism ― has combined with the backlash against COVID vaccination rules and other pandemic-related hurdles to result in a slowdown in childhood vaccination rates.

Taken together, these factors increase the risk of outbreaks like the one in Ohio. There have been 82 diagnosed measles cases in the state, almost all in the Columbus area, and the vast majority in patients 5 years old or younger. Most of the cases have occurred in the past two months, leading to the hospitalization of 33 children, primarily for dehydration, diarrhea and pneumonia.

Read more at Huff Post.

• Researchers estimate that more than 13,000 Americans received a diagnosis of glioblastoma — a type of brain cancer — in 2022.
• There is currently no cure for glioblastoma.
• Researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital developed a new cell therapy to both eliminate established tumors and act as a cancer vaccine to prevent new tumors from forming.

Researchers estimate that more than 13,000 Americans received a diagnosis of glioblastoma — a type of brain cancer — in 2022. And additional researchTrusted Source shows the rate of glioblastoma diagnoses is rising.

There is currently no cure for glioblastoma. Treatment options generally include a combination of surgeryTrusted Source, radiation, and chemotherapy to help slow the growth of tumors.

Now, researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital developed a new cell therapy that both helps eliminate current tumors and acts as a cancer vaccine to prevent tumors from reoccurring.

Read more at Medical News Today.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has granted a conditional license for a vaccine that helps protect honeybees from a deadly bacterial disease, U.S. biotech firm Dalan Animal Health announced Wednesday.

Why it matters: Dalan has developed the world’s first vaccine for honeybees in an effort to stop the spread of American foulbrood disease, caused by Paenibacillus larvae bacterium, which can weaken and destroy hives, per the Guardian.

• The U.S. and other countries have seen declines in bee colonies, which play a vital role in agriculture.

Zoom in: “One-third of the global food supply relies on pollination, and healthy commercial hives are essential to secure high crop yields,” Dalan noted in a statement.

Read more at Axios.

Online activists used the on-field collapse of American football star Damar Hamlin to spread anti-vaccination messages starting just minutes after Monday night’s incident.

In what has become a familiar pattern since Covid vaccines became available about two years ago, several influential accounts used the event to spread anti-vaccination content.

They included the Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who tweeted: “Before the covid vaccines we didn’t see athletes dropping dead on the playing field like we do now… Time to investigate the covid vaccines.”

That tweet was viewed around a million times within a day. But the idea that young, healthy athletes have never collapsed suddenly before Covid vaccines is easily disproven.

Read more at BBC.

For much of the pandemic, the main obstacle to vaccinating the world against the coronavirus was a lack of supply, as wealthy nations bought up vaccine doses and logistical bottlenecks hampered access for the poorest countries.

But increasingly, global vaccination efforts — spearheaded by Covax, a vaccine-sharing initiative backed in part by the World Health Organization — face a problem just as complex: a lack of demand. Backers of Covax say they have seen a sharp decline in dose orders, including in countries with relatively low vaccination rates.

This decline, fueled in part by pandemic fatigue, could prove the biggest obstacle to vaccination initiatives worldwide in the year ahead.

Read more at The Washington Post.

Updated COVID-19 shots, including bivalent boosters, dominated vaccine news in 2022, but good news also came for vaccines against malaria, Ebola and cancer.

Vaccines made news in other ways. Many people planned to skip influenza vaccines, record numbers of children missed measles vaccines globally, and a case of vaccine-derived polio in New York raised concerns of potential poliovirus spread.

Below are some of the vaccine-related stories you may have missed this year.

Fewer than half of US adults planned to get flu vaccine despite warnings of a severe season

After a mild 2021-2022 influenza season, a survey showed 49% of people in the U.S. were not planning to be vaccinated, despite widespread concern for a “tripledemic” in the fall.

Read more at Healio.

OKLAHOMA CITY — By the summer of 2021, Phil Maytubby, deputy CEO of the Health Department here, was concerned to see the numbers of people getting vaccinated against Covid slipping after an initially robust response.

With doubt, fear and misinformation running rampant nationwide — both online and offline — he knew the agency needed to rethink its messaging strategy.

So the Health Department conducted something called an online “sentiment search,” which gauges how certain words are perceived on social media. The tool found that many people in Oklahoma City didn’t like the word “vaccinate” — a word featured prominently in the health department’s marketing campaign.

“If you don’t know how your message is resonating with the public,” Maytubby said, “you’re shooting in the dark.”

Read more at NBC.

Influenza is continuing its early and severe rampage through the United States, but there’s some hopeful news for flu seasons of the future.

In a significant step, researchers recently said they’ve been able to immunize animals against all 20 known influenza A and B virus strains, marking an important step toward the goal of a single vaccine against all types of the flu.

Our current flu vaccines prime the body to protect against four strains: two influenza A strains and two B strains. The composition of these vaccines is changed each year in anticipation of which strains will make most people sick during the coming season.

Certain strains are known to circulate among humans, but many more circulate in animals and scientists worry that these viruses could jump to humans – suddenly exposing us to viruses our immune systems have never seen.

That’s where a universal flu vaccine would help.

Read more at CNN.