Adult Vaccinations

Hepatitis A is an inflammation of the liver. Unlike other types of hepatitis, hepatitis A isn’t chronic—it usually clears up on its own. Symptoms include fatigue, low appetite, stomach pain, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and jaundice. There's no treatment for hepatitis A. Symptoms usually last less than two months, but in some people they can last up to six months, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In rare cases, it can cause liver failure and death. There is a vaccine to prevent hepatitis A. And if you have been infected with the virus, you can't get it again.  It isn’t known how the berries involved in this particular recall became contaminated, but in general the virus is spread by what experts call the “fecal oral route.” “If a food worker has the virus and doesn’t adequately wash his or her hands after using the bathroom, the food could become contaminated,” says James E. Rogers, Ph.D., director of food safety research and testing at Consumer R...

  Katherine Pelts   Jina Park NEW ORLEANS — Quality improvement projects focused on education and multidisciplinary cooperation have been successful at improving hepatitis B vaccination rates among neonates, according to a pair of studies presented at the AAP National Conference & Exhibition. In 2017, the AAP recommended that all medically stable infants should be given an HBV vaccine as routine prophylaxis within the first 24 hours after birth. Even though a vaccine has been available since 1982, approximately 1,000 perinatal HBV infections occur each year in the United States. These infections can have serious consequences — approximately 90% of babies infected at birth will go on to develop chronic disease, and one-quarter will die prematurely from complications, according to researchers. At two separate institutions, clinicians launched QI projects to increase rates of the HBV vaccine birth dose to at least 85%, which is in line with a Healthy People 2020 ...

The Bacille Calmette Guérin (BCG) vaccine, routinely given to babies around the world, was developed more than 90 years ago, and provides limited protection that wanes by adolescence. GSK’s candidate vaccine M72/AS01E was tested in 3,300 HIV negative adults in Kenya, SA and Zambia who had latent TB, and the results of the phase 2b trial were published in the New England Journal of Medicine this week.   Participants were either given two doses of the vaccine or a placebo, and followed for three years to see if they developed pulmonary TB. Only 13 people who received the shots got TB, compared to 26 who did not. “The trial is a game changer because it is the first time a TB vaccine candidate has been shown to offer protection to people who are already infected with the Mycobacterium tuberculosis bacillus. Those people, about two thirds of SA adults, are at risk of progression to TB disease,” said the study’s principal investigator Mark Hatherill, director of the SA Tuberculosis Va...

Playing in the bracken in Norfolk: a harbouring ground for ticks? Universal Images Group via Getty Images As if they didn't have enough to worry about already, Brits found another thing to worry about at the start of the half term holiday with the news that brain illness spread by ticks has reached the U.K . A small number of ticks had been found to be infected in Thetford Forest, Norfolk and on the Hampshire-Dorset border. While Public Health England said the risk to humans was “low,” tick-borne encephalitis  (TBE) is a serious illness. It causes infection of the central nervous system, including the brain and spinal cord, which can lead to complications such as meningitis. The TBE virus (TBEV) is found in infected ticks in parts of Asia, Eastern Europe and Scandinavia. Some 10,000-12,000 clinical cases of TBE are reported worldwide each year , but actual cases are likely to be higher. The good news is that vaccination is an effective  prophylaxis  against TBE...

Facebook has taken down 14 ads the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare bought earlier this year encouraging parents to vaccinate their children. DHW spokeswoman Kelly Petroff said the ads were flagged to be blocked by a Facebook algorithm. She said the department has reached out to Facebook and is awaiting a response. “But right now, they have this autoblocking algorithm ... and it’s regularly misidentifying legitimate ads,” she said. Once DHW hears back, she said, they plan to resubmit the ads. The ads’ removal from Facebook was first reported last week by The Daily Beast website, in a broader story about how Facebook’s attempts to restrict anti-vaccine misinformation have led to multiple instances where Facebook’s auto-blocking software flagged pro-vaccine content from public health groups while ads from anti-vaccination groups made it through. The ads for the Idaho Immunization Program , a state-run program that provides free vaccines, featured images such as a...

A young boy being vaccinated. A young boy being vaccinated. Photo: File Photo /Fotolia Photo: File Photo /Fotolia Image 1 of / 7 Caption Close Image 1 of 7 A young boy being vaccinated. A young boy being vaccinated. Photo: File Photo /Fotolia Vaccination rates low at some Westport, Weston schools, study finds Back to Gallery WESTPORT — A new report shows several Westport and Weston schools have lower-than-recommended vaccination rates among their student populations. According to the report , Coleytown Elementary School, Greens Farms School and Saugatuck Elementary School had vaccination rates of 87.5 percent, 93.2 percent, and 92.6 percent, receptively — all below the federally recommended 95 percent guideline. In neighboring Weston, Hurlbutt Elementary School had a vaccination rate of 91.7 percent. SIGN UP here to get daily Westport News and alerts on breaking news. The statewide study, released by the stat...

T he Democratic Republic of the Congo will begin using a second Ebola vaccine as early as next week, the company developing the experimental product, Johnson & Johnson ( JNJ ), said Thursday. J&J announced it is donating enough of the product to vaccinate up to 500,000 people. The vaccine will be used as part of a clinical trial, but the aim is as much to help extinguish the long-running outbreak in the country’s northeast as it is to gather data on the effectiveness of the vaccine, which does not yet have a brand name. “We are very excited to be able to contribute,” Dr. Johan van Hoof, global head of Janssen Infectious Diseases and Vaccines, J&J’s vaccines division, told STAT. “We see this as a significant milestone having worked so long on this that this is now going to be used.” advertisement In recent weeks the outbreak has appeared to be waning, with fewer cases in October than any month since September 2018. Should the outbreak end in the next couple of months, i...

Since the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine first became available to men in Scotland, about 65.7 percent have been immunized. The new data from the Information Services Division (ISD) Scotland shows that about 14,000 eligible men attended a health clinic between July 2017 and June 2019.  Of those men, 9,146 received at least 1-dose of the HPV vaccine called Gardasil. The majority of these men were between the ages of 20 to 29. The Gardasil (Gardasil 4vHPV) vaccine protects against HPV, which is a sexually transmitted virus that causes the majority of cervical cancer cases in women. Additionally, the HPV virus causes cancers of the genitals, throat, and mouth. Earlier in 2019, researchers found the routine vaccination of Scottish girls aged 12-13 years with the bivalent Gardasil HPV vaccine led to a dramatic reduction in pre-invasive cervical disease. Furthermore, there was evidence of clinically relevant herd protection apparent in unvaccinated women. Jamie Rae, chief exec...

MILLIONS could be at risk as untreatable typhoid strains threaten a new global health emergency, experts have warned. The disease - which causes 21 million cases every year - is often overlooked as an ancient condition from the past, they said. 1 Experts have warned that untreatable strains of typhoid threaten a global health emergency Credit: Oxford Martin School But new extensively drug-resistant variants of typhoid fever are spreading across international borders. Cases have been reported in the UK, US, Germany, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Iraq, Guatemala, as well as more recently in Australia and Canada. Researchers from Oxford Martin School are now calling for urgent collective action from global health institutions to dedicate new resources to tackling the highly contagious bacterial infection. Neglected disease They say it has become a neglected disease of poorer countries following its elimination in many high-income countries. Scientists argue th...

PHOTO: FILE KARACHI:  Sindh Health Department officials and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) have expressed concern over the increasing number of extensively-drug resistant (XDR) typhoid cases in the province. Worldwide, typhoid infects around 21.6 million people every year, while the disease kills between 2,000 and 6,000 people each year. India and Pakistan are the most affected countries by the disease in Asia. The officials announced that the government will launch a Typhoid Conjugate Vaccine (TCV) campaign against the XDR typhoid fever from 18th to 30th November 2019. Their target is to vaccinate around 10 million children in Sindh and they advised the citizens to adopt simple hand hygiene methods and avoid eating unhealthy food. “Antibiotic resistance has become a major issue in the treatment and there are a few limited antibiotic options that have remained effective,” they said. “As many as 4,709 typhoid cases were registered in Sindh during August 2019, out...

New Tuberculosis Vaccine Could be a Game Changer While a new vaccine for TB might not see the market for another couple years, researchers are very optimistic it could have hugely helpful in treating TB worldwide. Oct 31, 2019 Researchers recently announced a “revolutionary” new tuberculosis treatment that could have amazing effects on the spread of tuberculosis (TB). The vaccine would provide long-term protection against the disease that kills 1.5 million people every year. While there are existing treatments and vaccines, they have proven not very effective. The world sees thousands of new cases each year, and many of these are multi-treatment resistant. It has been clear for some time that this disease is dangerous, and spreading. The team of researchers for the vaccine come from all over the world, and they see the vaccine having incredible potential to help communities around the globe—especially those with high rates of the disease. The new vaccine, which is made up of...

A n experimental vaccine continues to show promise in preventing active tuberculosis infections in patients with the latent form of the disease, researchers reported yesterday (October 29) in The New England Journal of Medicine and at the 50th Union World Conference on Lung Health conference. “The vaccine looks promising, and likely better than our century-old BCG [bacille Calmette-Guerin] vaccine,” Mario Raviglione, a global health expert at the University of Milan who headed the World Health Organization’s (WHO) global tuberculosis program from 2003 to 2017, tells The New York Times . The BCG vaccine is typically given to children in countries where the prevalence of TB is high. It is rarely given to adults because it varies in effectiveness in preventing Mycobacterium tuberculosis , the bacterium that causes the illness, from multiplying and causing disease in the lungs.  Tuberculosis is now one of the deadliest infectious diseases worldwide. It sickened an estimated 10 mil...

The existing vaccine for tuberculosis (TB) only works for very young children. This makes it difficult for public health officials and healthcare providers to combat the infection in older people.  But a new study conducted in Africa found a vaccine that could prevent TB from spreading among adults. Researchers tested the approach in nearly 3,600 patients in Kenya, Zambia and South Africa. The participants were divided into groups, with one receiving two doses of the TB vaccine every other month and another group that took dummy shots. Researchers then followed the participants for three years.  By the end of the study, researchers said the vaccine was 50 percent effective at preventing latent TB infection from turning into active disease. In the vaccine group, only 13 people developed active TB, while 26 in the placebo group had the disease.  The TB vaccine for adults, described in the New England Journal of Medicine, was developed by pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmit...

A candidate TB vaccine’s efficacy level and acceptable safety profile have been confirmed in a three-year clinical trial. It has been reported that GlaxoSmithKline’s (GSK’s) M72/AS01 E  candidate vaccine has significantly reduced the incidence of pulmonary tuberculosis disease (TB) in HIV-negative adults with latent TB infection. These results demonstrate an overall vaccine efficacy of 50 percent during the three years after vaccination and the candidate vaccine has an acceptable safety and reactogenicity profile. The final results are consistent with the primary analysis done after two years of follow-up. “These results demonstrate that for the first time in almost a century, the global community potentially has a new tool to help provide protection against TB,” said Dr Thomas Breuer , Chief Medical Officer of GSK Vaccines. “I want to thank our scientists for their dedicated effort and scientific innovation in developing this impactful vaccine candidate in partnership wit...

CIDRAP News : TB vaccine candidate shows sustained protection “In a promising development that seems to put the world a step closer to a better vaccine against tuberculosis (TB), researchers [Tuesday] published final results from a phase 2b trial, which showed nearly 50% protection against progression to active TB. The findings confirm earlier results first reported in 2018 for the adjuvanted subunit vaccine (M72/AS01E) developed by GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI). Researchers published their findings [Tuesday] in the New England Journal of Medicine and presented them at the 50th Union World Congress on Lung Health in Hyderabad, India…” (Schnirring, 10/29). Additional coverage of the trial results is available from The BMJ , MedPage Today , and Science Speaks . https://ift.tt/31YLigQ

A recent study ranked Indiana 47th among all states for the rate at which residents are vaccinated. WalletHub analyzed the 50 states and the District of Columbia across 18 key metrics, ranging from share of vaccinated children to share of people without health insurance to presence of reported measles outbreaks. Massachusetts, Vermont and Rhode Island placed first through third overall. Florida, Texas and Mississippi came in 49th-50th. Indiana ranked 44th for children and teenager immunization rates and 40th for adult and elderly vaccination rates overall, according to the study. Indiana ranked 40th for children aged 6 months to 17 years and 48th for adults for flu vaccinations. The Indiana State Department of Health reported two Hoosier deaths and 41 flu-like illnesses reported for this flu season as of Oct. 19. The state also ranked 33rd for the number of children 19-35 months old and living in poverty who had the combined 7-Vaccination. The combined 7-Vaccine combats a numbe...

Lebanon Reporter, The (IN) Oct. 30--A recent study ranked Indiana 47th among all states for the rate at which residents are vaccinated. WalletHub analyzed the 50 states and the District of Columbia across 18 key metrics, ranging from share of vaccinated children to share of people without health insurance to presence of reported measles outbreaks. Massachusetts, Vermont and Rhode Island placed first through third overall. Florida, Texas and Mississippi came in 49th-50th. Indiana ranked 44th for children and teenager immunization rates and 40th for adult and elderly vaccination rates overall, according to the study. Indiana ranked 40th for children aged 6 months to 17 years and 48th for adults for flu vaccinations. The Indiana State Department of Health reported two Hoosier deaths and 41 flu-like illnesses reported for this flu season as of Oct. 19th. The state also ranked 33rd for the number of children 19-35 months old and living in poverty wh...