vaccines

As ACSH's Ana Dolaskie approaches the final weeks of pregnancy, she is making sure all her vaccinations are up-to-date. This includes the TDAP vaccine (Tetanus-Diphtheria-Pertussis) and influenza shot. And she also wants to makes sure dads, partners, and others who are spending time with baby understand why getting vaccinated is key in protecting a newborn baby against potentially life-threatening illnesses, like pertussis (whooping cough).  
When is it safe to stop vaccinating against measles? Or against other rare and infectious diseases? In short, vaccinating against them can cease once the threat of future transmission is deemed sufficiently low.
Like a headache, pneumonia is a symptom or condition. Specifically, it's lung inflammation and it can be lethal. Lacking further information, simply having pneumonia provides no clue as to its underlying cause. Pneumonia can be the result of infection with bacteria, viruses or fungi. Which means there's no such thing as a "pneumonia vaccine."
It's one thing to be anti-vaccine. It's another to compare the "damage" that vaccines are doing to the damage done to the children killed in Syria by Assad's chemical weapons. But that is exactly what "The Health Ranger" did in a recent article. For that, he should be ashamed and his followers should really think twice.
Regardless of where one falls on the HPV vaccine debate, there's good news from Australia. New research shows that men who are unvaccinated for HPV are receiving protective benefits from the women who are vaccinated. 
President Trump recently received a letter from the American Academy of Pediatrics, with one message: vaccines are safe. The letter was in response to an ongoing concern that Mr. Trump is not only personally against vaccines, but is actively starting to investigate, and make changes in, our nation's vaccination policies.
Each year the recommended childhood and adolescent vaccine schedules are reviewed, adjusted and approved. The 2017 revisions are now available, and here are some of the recent changes affecting everyone from infants to those up to the age.   
New data shows that more than eight in ten Americans "support requiring all healthy schoolchildren to be vaccinated for measles, mumps and rubella." In addition, an overwhelming number of adults – 88 percent – "believe that the benefits of these inoculations outweigh the risks."
If Donald Trump's anti-vaccine tweets were not enough to make the scientific and medical community nervous, there is another reason to be concerned. Very concerned. The president-elect met this week with Robert Kennedy Jr., a vaccine denier and one of the most outspoken proponents of the false claim that vaccines cause autism.
The Cleveland Clinic remains mortified that one of their physicians, Dr. Daniel Neides, wrote blog post full of anti-science quackery. It has issued as strong of a rebuke as possible without firing him on the spot. Here's the full whiplashing by the Cleveland Clinic. 
Perhaps the strangest medical phenomenon discovered in recent years is a link between the lone star tick and an allergy to red meat. The bite of a lone star tick exposes a person to a small carbohydrate called alpha-gal. In a handful of people, this exposure elicits an abnormal immune response that produces a type of antibody called IgE, which causes allergies. Because red meat also contains alpha-gal, people who have been sensitized to the carbohydrate from a tick bite can develop life-threatening anaphylaxis if they consume pork or beef. 
Andrew Wakefield, Jenny McCarthy and their anti-vaccination groupies are making less and less of an impact, according to a new report released by the CDC which analyzes vaccination data on kindergartners.