So, your little one starts kindergarten soon. How exciting! You still have a few months before the school year starts, so now’s the time to make sure students-to-be have the vaccines needed to stay safe as they head into a new chapter of life. Much attention is rightly paid to COVID-19 these days, but we [...]
As parents, we know making sure our kids eat healthy, are physically active, get plenty of sleep, and have regular physicals is crucial to their overall health. But did you also you know preteen and teens need vaccines that protect against serious and potentially life-threatening diseases like meningitis, whooping cough and cancers caused by the [...]
Immunization gives parents the safe, proven power to protect their children from 14 serious and potentially deadly diseases before they turn two years old. To celebrate the importance of immunizations for a healthy start and throughout our lives, and to make sure children are protected with all the vaccines they need, we continue to join [...]
Every year, tens of thousands of adults in the United States suffer serious health problems, are hospitalized, or even die from diseases that could have been prevented by vaccination. Arizona has had 22 cases of measles in adults this year, making it the biggest measles outbreak of 2016 in the US. To celebrate the importance [...]
A study came out in Pediatrics last week that looked at how vaccine exemptions were related to a statewide outbreak of pertussis (also known as whooping cough) in California in 2010. As you might expect, the authors found that there were more whooping cough cases in areas with higher rates of vaccine exemptions. These findings were [...]
National Immunization Awareness Month gives us a great opportunity to talk about the need to improve national immunization coverage levels. Vaccine-preventable diseases are becoming increasingly rare in the US because vaccines are effective, but that doesn’t mean we should stop vaccinating. Even though most infants and toddlers have received all recommended vaccines by age 2, there [...]
Whooping cough, also known as pertussis, has been increasing in Arizona and the rest of the nation for the last few years. Pertussis usually runs in a cycle, peaking every 3-5 years and then decreasing again. Symptoms include fits of cough, vomiting after the fits of cough, and a whooping sound during cough. Some complications include pneumonia, [...]
Whooping cough (pertussis) is a growing problem in the US and Arizona. There were 41,880 cases and 14 infant deaths from pertussis in the US last year… which is the largest number of cases since the vaccine became available in the 50s. In Arizona there were 988 cases in 2012 and there’s a pretty substantial outbreak going on right [...]
Believe it or not only 27% of health care workers are up to date with their whooping cough booster… yet health care personnel can be infected with it by their patients, and then pass it on to other patients, family, and the community. The Arizona Partnership Against Pertussis, a coalition of seventeen health care organizations [...]
Every year a group called the Trust for America’s Health puts out a ‘Report Card” regarding what they believe is an assessment of each state’s readiness for a public health emergency. They use various measurements that they can find and grade each state against each other. The implication is that states that do poorly won’t [...]
