Not Just For Tots
Three new vaccines for older kids expand protection from Disease
Barbara Frankowski has been surprising some of her teenage patients this year. "They say, 'Aw, you promised there wouldn't be any more shots,'" says the pediatrician from Vermont Children's Hospital in Burlington. "They thought they were done by age 6." But there are now three vaccines for older kids: two to prevent dangerous infections and one to knock down the risk of cervical cancer. "Some of the parents are really gung-ho," she says, especially about Menactra, a vaccine for meningitis. "While that's not a common infection, it can kill you really quickly."
But what is supposed to be a new era for teen health has gotten off to a bumpy start with Menactra. The vaccine is supposed to be given at ages 11 to 12, but manufacturing shortages have severely limited the supply, forcing doctors to give shots only to college freshmen living in dorms, where close quarters make it easier to spread the disease. "We've had to turn younger kids away, and that bothers me," says pediatrician Robert Brown, chief of adolescent medicine at Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio.
That shortfall is only one hole, however, in a vastly expanded umbrella of protection for kids. In 1986, there were four vaccines available for children. Today, there are 12, some that cover multiple ills, "and that means 14 vaccine-preventable diseases now," says Lance Rodewald, director of immunization services at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (box, Page 76). Though the ballooning number of shots has raised concerns among a minority of parents who worry that vaccines themselves pose health risks, the needles keep on coming. In addition to the new vaccines for older children-a whooping cough booster joins the meningitis and cervical cancer shots-there are also more shots for younger kids, including an extra chicken pox booster.
That second chicken pox shot surprised Phoenix mother Nicole Reeve, 32,when she took Tatum, her 5-year-old daughter, in for a checkup two weeks ago and learned she needed a "catch-up" needle. "I thought she was up to date," says Reeve. "But kids seem to be a lot healthier now than when I grew up, because of these vaccines. Tatum wasn't thrilled. But I'd rather have another little poke and some tears and have healthier kids."
Harold Magalnick, Tatum's pediatrician, is a big vaccine fan. "It's probably the best health intervention ever." And CDC statistics bear him out. Before vaccinations for rubella, or German measles, started in the 1960s, for instance, there were 3,300 cases per 100,000 people. After the vaccine was introduced, that number dropped to 0.2 per 100,000. When a vaccine for haemophilus influenza type b, which causes meningitis, was approved in 1985, the number of cases dropped from 104 per 100,000 people to 0.1. And cases of whooping cough declined from 4,720 per 100,000 in the early 1940s to 33 after the vaccine came along.
Doubts. But Bambi Carlson, 38, another Phoenix mother whose six kids are also patients of Magalnick's, isn't buying. "God had a perfect plan when he designed the immune system, and it works fine on its own. When you add these multiple shots, it gets compromised," she says. Her younger kids, who are not immunized, are proof, she says; they get much milder colds than the older ones, who did get some shots.
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