Get Vaccinated!

Vaccinations are a pretty controversial topic these days, what with every celebrity & politician becoming an expert and espousing an opinion that can be virally transmitted (pun intended) via the Internet.  Now, I'm not a film critique by any stretch of the imagination, but all these thoughts ran through my mind as I watched Contagion last night.  It's really amazing how Hollywood can make epidemiology & basic lab work look so sexy on camera.  

I thought the screen writers did a nice job of portraying the difficulty in piecing together disparate incidents into an epidemic, searching for the cause, and then developing a cure (vaccine).  Of course, washing hands, not touching your face, and keeping your distance from others was mentioned over & over again in the movie, as a means to minimize transmission, which is kind of an impossible proposition for anyone dependent upon public transportation.  There was also mention of the need to balance 100% scientific fact vs public health nightmares & riots.

I also thought the screen writers did a nice job of describing how the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is allegedly in bed with Big Pharma and uses illness as a means to make a profit.  What's scary is how anarchy can start so randomly due to our innate survival instincts.  Of course, they had to make Jude Law, the anti-vaccination person, the bad guy who ends up a target of the evil federal government for securities fraud.

So why all this preamble?  Well, the 2012 Childhood & Adolescent Immunization Schedules were just published in Pediatrics.  And the adult version was published in Annals of Internal Medicine 2 days ago.  When I think back to what I was taught in medical school, it's amazing how the vaccination schedule has changed over the last quarter century.  In any case, take a good look at the vaccinations and their age of administration.  And get caught up!

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