August: Immunization Awareness Month

August has always been something of a controversial month. Despite many people finding August a charming and perfectly agreeable time of the year, August has a distinctly negative connotation to younger folk, as it’s ‘Back to School Month’ (horrors!). However, what significantly fewer people know – adults as well as children – is that August is also ‘National Immunization Awareness Month’.

Vaccinations are, to make a colossal understatement, important. According to the Centers for Disease Contol and prevention, “[a]pproximately 45,000 adults [in the US] die each year from vaccine-preventable diseases”. To put things in perspective, this number is more than ten times as large as the number of combined US casualties of Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation New Dawn. More shocking still, this accounted for roughly 1.85% of all US deaths in 2009; in other words, about one in every fifty deaths was fully preventable. There’s a significant problem at hand when so many lives are capable of slipping through this nation’s collective fingers, and this problem must be addressed as soon as possible.

What can one do about this? Fortunately, a simple answer to this question exists. In addition to the above, the CDC also states that “[t]he most substantial barrier to vaccination coverage is lack of knowledge about these vaccines among adult patients and adult providers”. With the technology at our disposal, increasing vaccination awareness should be incredibly easy to do. You could send emails en masse, put up flyers around your workplace, make a couple of Facebook statuses… there are hundreds of options. Do whatever you can to further this cause – with 45,000 lives per year on the line, nothing is trivial.