Health
IDSA calls for increased awareness, access to adult vaccinations
NEWS IN BRIEF — Posted July 9, 2007
Demand for adult vaccines should be nurtured by increasing physician and patient awareness that they exist, and government funding should be allocated to pay for these shots, states a policy paper by the Infectious Diseases Society of America in Clinical Infectious Diseases last month.
"We have done a great job in this country delivering vaccines to children, but we have done an awful job delivering vaccines to adults," said Neal A. Halsey, MD, chair of the workgroup that developed this policy blueprint and professor at Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health.
The document also recommends including adult immunization rates as a measure of health care system quality, increased surveillance of vaccine-preventable disease in this age group and increased research in this area.
Note: This item originally appeared at http://www.ama-assn.org/amednews/2007/07/09/hlbf0709.htm.