VacciNation

More patients are receiving conflicting information about vaccines, and after the rise of preventable outbreaks in 2019, Dr. Barbara Pahud joins Dr. Jennifer Caudle to debunk the most common myths surrounding vaccines and to share how we can better educate our patients.

It’s an unfortunate reality that an increasing number of patients are refusing to get vaccinated—regardless of whether that’s the recommendation for themselves or their children. But luckily, there are ways you can talk to your patients about this, as Dr. Jennifer Caudle explains.

As physicians, we know that vaccines help protect people from preventable diseases, but somehow this message is getting lost among our patients. With more parents than ever choosing to skip the needle, Dr. Andrew Wilner dives into the 16th chapter of his book, Bullets and Brains, where he discusses the widespread benefits of vaccines and how they not only protect your patients’ children, but all of us.

August is National Immunization Awareness Month sponsored by the National Public Health Information Coalition. Dr. Jennifer Caudle discusses the important role immunizations play in healthcare.

Human papillomavirus (HPV) infection remains one of the most common sexually transmitted infections in both females and males, with about 9 in 10 people contracting HPV at some point in their lives.

Host Dr. Brian McDonough is joined by Samantha Gottlieb, medical anthropologist and author of Not Quite a Cancer Vaccine: Selling HPV and Cervical Cancer. They explore the history of Gardasil, a vaccine developed for HPV but marketed primarily as a cervical cancer vaccine, which became embroiled in sociopolitical debates about adolescent sexuality and pediatric vaccinations.

The two discuss these precedents alongside current controversies, such as whether vaccinating both males and females will induce herd immunity, and if the benefits outweigh the risks.

Although most college students in the U.S. believe it is important to get an annual influenza vaccine, less than half say they typically get vaccinated, according to results from a new National Foundation for Infectious Diseases (NFID) survey. Motivating college students to get their annual flu vaccinations remains a public health challenge that many health care officials have struggled to overcome.

Host Dr. Jennifer Caudle chats with Dr. Lisa Ipp about the results and takeaways from this survey and what methods and strategies would be the most effective in encouraging more students to get vaccinated.

Dr. Ipp is a Associate Professor of Clinical Pediatrics at Weill Cornell Medicine and Associate Director of Adolescent Medicine at New York-Presbyterian Komansky Children’s Hospital. She also serves as a board member for the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases (NFID)

Until the late 1960s, tens of thousands of American children suffered crippling birth defects if their mothers had been exposed to rubella, popularly known as German measles, while pregnant; there was no vaccine and little understanding of how the disease devastated fetuses.

In June 1962, a young biologist in Philadelphia, using human tissue samples sent from Sweden, produced a line of cells that allowed the creation of vaccines against rubella and other common childhood diseases. Two years later, in the midst of a massive German measles epidemic, the vaccine that would one day wipe out homegrown rubella was introduced. This vaccine has since protected more than 150 million people in the United States, and its development method has also led to other vaccines that have protected billions of people around the world from polio, rabies, chicken pox, measles, hepatitis A, shingles, and adenovirus.

Host Dr. John Russell chats with Meredith Wadman, author of The Vaccine Race: Science, Politics, and the Human Costs of Defeating Disease, about the story of both the science of this urgent race and the political and ethical controversies that nearly ended it prematurely.

In 1998 Andrew Wakefield, a British gastroenterologist with a history of self-promotion, published a paper with a shocking allegation: the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine might cause autism. The media seized hold of the story and, in the process, helped to launch one of the most devastating health scares ever. Yet despite the numerous studies that failed to find any link between childhood vaccines and autism, it has since been popularized by media personalities, and declining vaccination rates have led to outbreaks of deadly illnesses like Hib, measles, and whooping cough. In The Panic Virus: The True Story Behind the Vaccine-Autism Controversy, author Seth Mnookin draws on interviews with parents, public-health advocates, scientists, and anti-vaccine activists to tackle a fundamental question: How do we decide what the truth is?