CDC survey finds adults are not getting important vaccines

WASHINGTON According to a new survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, only 2 percent of adults last year received a shot that could have protected them from shingles, according to Reuters. What’s worse is that adults also fail to get vaccines for other illnesses like, tetanus, whooping cough and influenza.

The CDC surveyed 7,000 adults as part of its annual look at childhood vaccinations and found very low levels of adult vaccination. It found that most adults cannot name more than one or two diseases that they can get a vaccine to prevent. Just under half could name the influenza vaccine, and at the most, 18 percent could name each of any of the other vaccines.

The agency and its advisers recommend that adults get shots to protect against chicken pox, diphtheria, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, the human papillomavirus—which can cause cervical cancer—influenza, measles, meningitis, mumps, pertussis or whooping cough, pneumonia, rubella or German measles, shingles and tetanus.

“Combined, these infectious diseases kill more Americans annually than breast cancer, HIV/AIDS or traffic accidents,” said Vanderbilt University's William Schaffner, vice president of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases.

While childhood vaccination rates were very high—because they are required for the children for school admission—doctors forget to prescribe these vaccines for adults and those same people also forget to ask for them, according to industry experts.