Now adults have an immunization schedule, too

By Rita Rubin, USA TODAY

Just because you're old enough to vote doesn't mean you're too old to need vaccinations.

To help get that message out to doctors, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has developed the first schedule for adult immunizations, similar to the long-standing childhood-immunization schedule.

"We're all acculturated to getting our children immunized," Surgeon General Richard Carmona says. But for adults, he says, "that seems to be a foreign theme."

The American Academy of Family Physicians and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists have endorsed the new adult-immunization schedule. It is aimed at people older than 18, says Walter Orenstein, director of the CDC's National Immunization Program.

"Working with doctors is probably the most important thing we can be doing," Orenstein says.

The adult immunization schedule, posted on the CDC's Web site at www.cdc.gov/nip/recs/adultschedule.htm, covers eight different vaccines, only one fewer than the childhood-immunization schedule.

The program takes into account age as well as pre-existing medical conditions such as heart disease or chronic liver disease.

For example, Orenstein says, healthy 45-year-olds need only a tetanus and diphtheria booster, and then only if they haven't received one in at least a decade.

But 45-year-olds with diabetes also should get an annual flu shot and a vaccine against pneumococcal disease, which is caused by a bacterial infection.

Each year, influenza and pneumococcal disease together kill more than 26,000 Americans and lead to more than 280,000 hospitalizations.

Americans are far from meeting the Healthy People 2010 immunization goals of immunizing 90% of people 65 and older against the flu and pneumococcal disease. In 2001, Orenstein says, just two-thirds of white Americans 65 and older got flu shots, and only about half of African-American and older Hispanics did.

And little more than half of older Americans have received pneumococcal vaccinations, says William Schaffner, chairman of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville.

Pneumococcal infection can cause pneumonia, sepsis and meningitis. Most people need only one shot to protect them from these potentially fatal complications for the rest of their lives.