Immunizations keep lives

April 23 to 30 is National Infant Immunization week. National Infant Immunization week is an annual observance promote by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to highlight the significance of protecting infants from vaccine-preventable diseases. Through immunization, we can now keep infants and children from 14 vaccine-preventable diseases before the age of 2. Unfortunately, more than 100,000 children across the world exterior of the United States die from measles every year. In the United States, there were 42 cases of measles between January and April. Dangerous infections such as poliovirus and haemophilus influenzae have been brought under control since of the immunization of vulnerable infant early in life.

Although immunization in our country has been very successful, that success depends on reliable vigilance on the part of parents and health care providers. Parents need to be aware of immunization agenda and the advantages of immunization to their infants. When the system for immunizing young children in our country breaks down, there are grave penalty. In California during 2010, there was an outbreak of a vaccine-avoidable disease called whooping cough. There were 8,000 infections and 10 infant deaths. The cause of the outbreak was a population of children who did not get proper immunization.

Adolescent and adult vaccination with Tdap boosters also will help avoid adult disease which will decrease the spread of this deadly disease to infants. The information is that the vaccines given to children younger than 2 years in this country are very safe. The vaccines are thoroughly tested before being accepted for public use and are carefully monitored by doctors, researchers, and public health officials. Numerous studies have exposed that there is no link between vaccines and autism. There is no question vaccines make our country healthier and keep our youngest children. If you have questions about what vaccines your child should get, talk to your pediatrician.

Adults may not be distribution whooping cough: study

The findings, published on Thursday in the journal Science, oppose the notion that infected adults are behind outbreak in California and elsewhere of whooping cough, an infectious disease caused by the bacterium Bordetella pertussis. A U.S. advisory panel last month suggested that adults over 65 be given a booster of the "Tdap" vaccine for tetanus, diphtheria and pertussis, or whooping cough, to keep infants under a year old, who are too young to be vaccinated. But elder people may not be the major culprit, Pejman Rohani of the University of Michigan and colleagues say.

Whooping cough, which causes unmanageable, violent coughing, infects 30-50 million people a year globally and kills about 300,000, mostly children in rising countries. There are regular outbreaks in developed countries, including one in California that has exaggerated more than 6,400 people and killed at least 10 infants, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. To study the belongings of social connections on distribution whooping cough, the research team used a situation in Sweden. That country halt its whooping cough vaccination program in 1979 because of vaccine security concerns, and did not resume routine vaccination for 17 years. But health establishment continued to track cases of whooping cough by age group.

"We took advantage of an unexpected natural experiment," Rohani said in a telephone interview. The group compare this to a 2008 study of more than 7,000 people from eight European country that tracked social contacts by age. They plugged this into a computer model to see how social associates affected the extend of whooping cough. The team found that when Sweden resumes vaccinating young children, there was a big drop in the number of cases of whooping cough in all age categories excepting in teenagers. With the model of social mixing, children frequently interact with other children, and are unlikely to be infected by adults, they found.

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