Vaccinations: The Illusion Of Adult Invincibility?

By Celia Canon- Talk Radio News Service

Adults are more at risk of catching potential deadly disease than they might realize, according to the American Medical Association.

Jason Spangler of Partnership for Prevention, AMA representative Dr. Litjen Tan and Executive Director of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases Len Novick combined forces in a call for action to alter this risk.

Spangler, Dr.Tan and Novick want to push for greater awareness on the possibility to reduce death by vaccine-cured diseases by checking adults’ updates on their vaccinations.

As the concern for the H1N1 virus dissipates, the environment has recently been propitious to the discussion of how the spread of potentially deadly viruses could be prevented following recent estimates of a total 46 H1N1-caused deaths worldwide.

The collaboration of Partnership for Prevention, NFID and AMA leads expert to agree that “there is no strong infrastructure to immunize adults in the United States”, said Tan.

According to them there will not be an improvement in the number of deaths by curable viruses so long as adults continue to believe in what Novick calls an “illusion” that adults do not need vaccines as much as children or the elderly.

As Novick said, both patients and their physicians are to blame for this problem, as patients “wait for doctors to raise the issue (of vaccination)”, while vaccines for adults are existent “but not used as recommended”.

Tan said, “There needs to be commitment… States need to strengthen support for adult vaccination and appropriate budgets accordingly,” to which he added that vaccinations should be switched from Medicare’s Plan D, which covers the costs of prescription drugs for beneficiaries of Medicare to Plan B, where outpatient care expenses are reimbursed. Tan argues that this change in category will encourage physicians to use vaccines as “preventive services in part B.”

In addition, the NFID advocates its professional practice toolkit which aims at listing the options doctors have in order to address this issue, such as putting pamphlets on vaccination in waiting rooms.

Partnership for Prevention saluted the efforts of both the AMA and the NFID in identifying the consequences of the lack of vaccination in adults and the recommendations that both organizations made to counter this problem.