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.

Read more at Yahoo!

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.

Read more at Gavi.

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. 

Read more at Harvard School of Public Health.

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.

Read more at Health Day.

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.

Read more at CNN.

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.

Read more at Parade.

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.

Read more at U.S. News.

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.

Read more at Axios.

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.

Read more at CBS.

Despite the widespread availability of COVID-19 vaccines since December 2020, sociodemographic inequities in vaccination rates—and preventable COVID-related deaths—have persisted.

A study by Jenny S. Guadamuz, assistant professor of health policy and management at UC Berkeley School of Public Health, reveals disturbing patterns in the national data gathered in 2022.

Writing in the Journal of the American Pharmacists Association, Guadamuz reports that 48% of White adults and nearly 67% of Asian adults received at least two COVID-19 vaccines and at least one booster shot. In contrast, Guadamuz found that only 35% of both Black and Latinx adults received the same number of COVID-19 inoculations.

Read more at Berkeley Public Health.