Deadly cancer-causing measles also reduced by 3% and syphilis by 4% among its exposed population, while rates of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and colorectal cancer fell
A vaccine may have averted more than 100,000 deaths in the US over 10 years from conditions that usually make people very sick, including cervical cancer, antibiotic-resistant bacteria and pneumonia.
And that’s just the 10-year baseline – this study went further and looked at declines in children, teens and young adults’ health.
The unvaccinated had an 83% higher risk of developing syphilis, 70% higher risk of contracting gonorrhea, an 88% greater risk of developing pneumonia, 59% greater risk of developing hepatitis B, an 82% greater risk of contracting sepsis, 66% greater risk of contracting HIV and a 23% greater risk of developing colon cancer.
Just before the deadline for mandatory vaccination against measles, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) released a report Wednesday that provides a summary of the results of a decade of studies for children, adolescents and young adults.
For all age groups combined, the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine had a 93% protection against hospitalization. The study used the COVID-19 vaccine as a comparison for the measles vaccine.
While these are preliminary results, national flu vaccination rates continue to climb, according to the CDC, which sponsored the study. The CDC recommends the flu vaccine for children aged six months to five years. It also suggests that the vaccine is vital to older children, teens and young adults, depending on the viral strain and that more studies are needed to identify the optimal timing of vaccination.
While the HPV vaccine has proven safe and effective, it does not protect against genital warts, HPV types 4, 6, 11 and 16, which are among the most common strains of HPV and can cause cervical cancer and genital warts. HPV infection is 100% non-plausible, and almost all sexually active people will be infected with a strain at some point in their lives.
The HPV vaccine currently protects against cervical cancer but is not recommended to vaccinate children against genital warts, as recommended by the CDC.
No vaccination schedule has been developed for autism, for which there is no clear cause. But according to the CDC, researchers who have studied the so-called “autism epidemic” in the US suggest that babies in whom the immune system is impaired develop autism due to defects in the immune system, differences in fetal development, genes and the environment.
There has been a rise in autism spectrum disorders in children from the very young, which is of concern to the CDC, which states that this study suggests the decline in influenza and pneumonia deaths in children and adolescents has occurred because of a decline in the detection and treatment of the disease.
The decline in the risk of pneumonia and influenza occurred in almost every US region and varied between children of minority and non-minority populations. But rates of hospitalization were found to be higher among children in urban areas than those in rural areas, suggesting that more urban parents and doctors pay closer attention to the flu’s severity in their population.
In some cases, specifically since 2000, the rate of pneumonia and influenza-associated hospitalizations declined even more than the rate of overall deaths.
The rate of cesarean births among black women is twice that of white women. There have been no links between cesarean births and vaccine-preventable death or disability in any pregnancy, according to the CDC. But while black women are more likely to choose a cesarean, rates of the procedure seem to decrease along with maternal obesity rates.
The National Institutes of Health, the CDC and the General Accounting Office collaborated on the study and identified large multi-year declines in death rates from pneumonia and sepsis and other infectious diseases between 2000 and 2014, while rates of antibiotics resistance increased. However, the study concluded that death rates declined among children and adolescents, as well as among adults aged 19 and older.
