Like a hotshot team, a rapid response by public health is essential to stopping the spread of measles in unvaccinated persons… and disease detectives in Maricopa County are currently working to squash a measles outbreak right now. Last week a person with measles visited a restaurant, church and airport in Arizona, exposing over a thousand [...]
Every year the World Health Organization holds a meeting with worldwide experts to make recommendations for the next season’s Northern Hemisphere flu vaccine. It seems strange to plan for next season when we’re still in the midst of the current flu season, but the vaccine-making process still takes about 6 months. Influenza season generally ramps [...]
Whooping Cough is making headlines again – with more than 18,000 cases in the U.S. and 600 cases so far this year in AZ. You might wonder why we continue to have lots of whooping cough cases in the US and AZ when the other vaccine preventable diseases are real rare (e.g. measles, mumps etc.). [...]
Pretty much everybody knows that getting an annual influenza vaccine protects them from getting influenza- but fewer people realize that getting vaccinated saves other people’s lives as well. That’s because if a large percentage of the population takes advantage of the vaccine (called herd immunity) we can reduce the overall spread of the disease- and save [...]
The FDA approved the 2011-2012 influenza vaccine this week. The strains in this year’s vaccine were recommended by the CDC and the World Healthy Organization after studying virus samples collected from around the world to find the influenza viruses that are the most likely to cause illness during the upcoming flu season. The strains selected [...]
He’s a guy that may have saved more lives than any other single person in history. In the 1790's, he noticed that “milkmaids” seldom came down with smallpox. He developed a theory that the blisters which “milkmaids” commonly had as part of their work (from a disease called cowpox) somehow protected them from smallpox. In [...]
