Immunizing your children and yourself

With just weeks to go until the start of a new school year, being up-to-date on immunizations should be top of mind. MPB’s Karen Brown spoke with University of Mississippi Medical Center Pediatrician, Dr. William Sorey, about who needs to be vaccinated and against what. The first question: Do students heading off to college need any vaccinations?

Dr. Sorey: all the colleges have some immunization requirements. Generally they’re required to have the school shots they needed to get into elementary, junior high or high school. In addition some colleges are requiring a shot for meningitis. It protects against a particularly bad form of meningitis that has a way of hitting and when it hits an area where there are a lot of people congregating like in dormitories or colleges, there tend to be large numbers of kids that get very sick. And this is one of the few illnesses that can kill a healthy young adult in pretty short order.

Karen: for kids entering school in Mississippi, it’s law to be immunized against certain things and this year, a second chicken pox if required. Why?

Dr. Sorey: To get protection from chicken pox, one vaccination doesn’t give you very lengthy coverage. That second booster vaccine heightens your immunity and gives you a longer period of immunity. The vaccine is not lifelong, however so I have a little bit of concern for adults later on, as they get older, whether or not they’ll still have protection.

Karen: Are measles and mumps still out there? Is there still a concern about them?

Dr. Sorey: We’ve done such a good job of eradicating these illnesses that you don’t see them very often. Unfortunately, these illnesses, even though they don’t occur here in the states much, they’re still out there. Measles can come from foreign countries that don’t have good immunization programs. Mumps still pop up periodically and Rubella is one of these things, we don’t see very often, but the big thing rubella is not the person who gets it, that person will have very few symptoms. The problem is if a pregnant Mom gets it early on in pregnancy, the baby is devastated.

Karen: There are some in Mississippi who have somehow fallen through the cracks and have not been immunized since infancy. They’re getting ready to enter school. Can children be caught up on their immunizations?

Dr. Sorey: Yes, there are some catch up immunizations at the health department they can do. Do a compressed schedule of the regular ones, get some basic protection on board and then make sure they get into follow-up on the subsequent things.

Karen: There are some that would say that there is a tie between autism and immunizations, particularly a series of immunizations that are given at once. Can you address that?

Dr. Sorey: That’s not what the scientific evidence indicates. There’s a lot of concern about autism and I don’t know all the answers on autism … mercury was a very convenient thing to blame for a long time but mercury is pretty much out of immunization play. Immunizations are about as mercury-free as the world can make them. If mercury were the culprit we should have had autism running rampant years ago whenever we had large amounts of it in the vaccine and large amounts in our environment. As the mercury levels have fallen, the autism rates have continued to go up so I don’t think it’s mercury. There was a good federal court decision about vaccines and autism just recently and that’s not what they found either. People just need to talk to their doctors about that. Again, I don’t know all the answers but I do know that if you don’t vaccinate your kids and you have enough kids or adults in the community who are not protected, these diseases come back and they do hurt you. Despite some comments in the media to the contrary, having the disease is not better than getting the immunization.

Karen: Are there any immunizations that adults should think about getting?

Dr. Sorey: The number one for adults is the pneumococcal vaccine; the pneumonia vaccine. To me, that’s the cheapest insurance in good health available for adults. Flu vaccine is right behind that. A Tetanus booster is probably a reasonable thing to have though most people have pretty good immunity for that. You just need to talk to your doctor to see what might be applicable under the circumstances but my single most important one for adults, once you cap forty, is the pneumonia vaccine.