A New CDC survey finds that a very few amount of Americans are actually taking the time to get vaccinated against certain diseases and conditions including; tetanus, whooping cough, shingles and influenza.
The survey of more than 700 US adults found that not even half of them could name multiple diseases that had vaccines available to protect them from contracting.
When it came to asking about shingles vaccinations, only 1.9% of people surveyed had received their vaccine shot.
Furthermore, only 2% had received a whooping cough vaccine shot, and only 44% had received a tetanus shot within the last decade.
“There are more than 1 million new cases of shingles in the United States every year; over half in people 60 and older,” said Dr. Michael Oxman of the University of California, San Diego, and the San Diego Veterans Affairs Medical Center.
“The vaccine not only helps reduce the risk of getting shingles, but it reduces the incidence of postherpetic neuralgia, a long-lasting shingles pain syndrome that constitutes the most common serious and debilitating complication of shingles.”
The agency and its advisers recommend that adults get shots to protect against chicken pox, diphtheria, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, the human papillomavirus or HPV, which causes cervical cancer, influenza, measles, meningitis, mumps, pertussis or whooping cough, pneumonia, rubella or German measles, shingles
and tetanus.
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