There is a lot to look forward to, yet a lot to check off your to-do list, when planning a trip abroad. Between booking your hotel stays and exciting excursions, there may be one thing you haven’t considered – travel vaccinations. For your health and safety, it’s important to plan ahead so you can avoid any potential health risks and enjoy your vacation to its fullest. 

“Travel vaccinations are specific immunizations that protect you from a range of illnesses and diseases that may be more common in countries outside of the U.S.,” says Dr. Asif Hussain, an internal medicine provider with a clinical interest in travel medicine at Advocate Health Care in Oswego, Ill. “The vaccines also lower the risk of bringing any illnesses home with you that could potentially spread to others.” 

Read more at Health eNews.

Vaccines are a pillar of good public health. We saw that sentiment play out as the world dealt with COVID-19 — there was an eagerness for a rollout of safe and effective vaccines to help get the pandemic under control.

And with good reason — vaccines save millions of lives each year from deadly diseases caused by viruses or bacteria.

“Diseases such as smallpox and polio that were killers a century or two ago are now barely blips in our conscience,” notes pulmonologist Daniel Culver, DO.

They’re crucial to fighting infectious diseases — yet there’s still a lot of misinformation floating around about vaccines.

To help clear up any confusion, Dr. Culver explains what you should know about how vaccines are developed and how they work.

Read more at Cleveland Clinic.

From birth through age 18, children in the United States are routinely immunized against a host of preventable childhood diseases. These include measles, mumps, rubella, polio, human papillomavirus (HPV), hepatitis A and B, tetanus, diphtheria, and other diseases. Routine childhood immunization is highly effective at preventing disease over a lifetime, reducing the incidence of all targeted diseases, and, for the U.S. population in 2019, preventing more than 24 million cases of disease.¹ Yet despite this success, childhood vaccination rates have seen a troubling decline in this country since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, deepening preexisting gaps in vaccination participation. The decline in routine childhood vaccinations is concerning from health, equity, and economic perspectives.

Read more at The Center for American Progress.

To prevent a repeat of last winter’s “tripledemic” of respiratory illnesses, Americans will be encouraged to roll up their sleeves not just for flu shots but for two other vaccines, one of them entirely new.

Federal health officials have already asked manufacturers to produce reformulated Covid vaccines to be distributed later this year. Recently, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention took an additional step, endorsing two new vaccines against respiratory syncytial virus for older Americans.

The three shots — flu, Covid and R.S.V. — may help to reduce hospitalizations and deaths later this year. But there are uncertainties about how the vaccines are best administered, who is most likely to benefit, and what the risks may be.

Read more at The New York Times.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is reducing funding to states for child vaccination programs, according to an agency email obtained by KFF Health News.

The funding cut “is a significant change to your budget,” said the email to immunization managers, dated June 27 and signed by two CDC officials.

The immunization managers who received the message are public health officials who direct state, territorial, and local programs to promote vaccinations against a variety of infectious diseases, such as measles and chickenpox.

The reduction comes from a federal immunization grant — totaling about $680 million in the latest year — that supports vaccination programs for children, according to the Association of Immunization Managers.

Read more at KFF Health News.

COVID-19 vaccination helped reduce disparities in disease incidence between low- and high-income communities, according to a new analysis led by Cedars-Sinai investigators.

While lower-income communities had lower vaccination rates than higher-income communities, the impact of vaccination on disease incidence was larger in lower-income communities. As a result, investigators say, vaccination led to reduced income-related disparities in COVID-19 incidence. 

The findings were published today in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, a publication of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Read more at Cedars Sinai.

Now that federal health officials have laid out a plan to switch out the bivalent vaccine for a new booster this fall, readers have many questions about timing. Specifically, for those who have yet to receive their second bivalent vaccine, should they wait to get the shot until the updated version targeting the now-dominant XBB variants becomes available?

“I’m 73 and have always been in good health,” Doris from New York writes. “I eat right and exercise regularly. High blood pressure, osteoporosis and thyroid disease are all well-managed. I am not immunocompromised. I have had mild covid once. I continue to mask in crowds. Should I get the second booster now or just wait for the fall?”

Read more at The Washington Post.

Americans 60 and older can get a new RSV vaccine but should discuss it with their doctor first, U.S. health officials recommended Thursday.

The newly approved vaccines are expected to be ready in the fall, a time when flu shots and updated COVID-19 shots also will be available. Those eligible for the RSV vaccine should talk with their doctor to see if it is right for them, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a statement.

The CDC said adults with chronic heart or lung disease, weakened immune systems and those living in long-term care facilities are at higher risk for the respiratory infection.

Read more at ABC.

Imagine a time when an estimated 4 million people in the United States were infected with measles each year, of which nearly 50,000 required hospitalization and 500 died. Although it seems almost impossible today, that was reality in America in the 1950s. And the global numbers were even more staggering, with an estimated 30 million cases and 2 to 4 million deaths annually.

It was in 1963 that the first measles vaccine was licensed in the United States, and an improved version became available in 1968. The vaccine was so effective that by 2000, measles was declared eliminated in the U.S. by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. However, memory can be short-lived, and over the past two decades, there has been a decreasing rate of childhood vaccinations in the U.S. and worldwide. This has once again opened the door for measles virus, with over 1,200 cases being reported in the U.S. in 2019 and nearly 200,000 measles deaths globally that year.

Read more at Forbes.

The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE) will start to send out notifications to parents and guardians for children who may be due for certain routine vaccinations. 

The initiative starts this Tuesday, June 27, and text message and email notifications will start to be sent out to more than 1,300 children and adolescents ages 7-18 if they are due for updated vaccinations. 

Children whose records are in the Colorado Immunization Information System will be sent a notice for vaccines including Hepatitis A & B, Measles, Mumps, Chickenpox, Polio, Human Papillomavirus (HPV), and Tetanus, amongst other vaccinations.

Read more at KRDO.