Measles, Mumps and Rubella Vaccine(GlaxoSmithKline Plc)

Experts at Cincinnati Children's and Children's Hospital Colorado say findings could enable more at-risk children to be protected from measles, mumps, and chicken pox CINCINNATI, Oct. 16, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Live vaccinations provided to children who previously received liver or kidney transplants were found to be safe and prompted an immune response to guard against several life-threatening conditions, according to a new study published Oct. 12, 2023, in JAMA Network Open. Continue Reading A liver-transplant recipient receives the MMR vaccine at Cincinnati Children’s. The study involving 18 U.S. institutions that perform organ transplants included 281 children on chronic immunosuppressive medications. (Credit: Family provided photo) The study, based on data from 18 organ transplant centers, was co-authored by Lara Danziger-Isakov, MD, MPH, interim director of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Cincinnati Children's, and Amy Feldman, MD, MSCS, medical director of the Liver Transplant Program at Children's Hospital Colorado. The results are important because the rates of measles, mumps and the varicella-zoster virus that causes chicken pox are rising nationally and internationally, leaving immunocompromised children at risk for life-threatening conditions, according to Danziger-Isakov, senior author of the study. "This shifts the paradigm of the approach to protecting this vulnerable population where live viral vaccines were previously avoided," Danziger-Isakov says. "This should enable children who have received organ transplants to integrate into their communities with more confidence and decreased risk for acquiring chicken pox or measles, which have both made a resurgence." Global surges of measles and mumps were exacerbated by decreasing herd immunity as millions of vaccine doses were missed during the COVID-19 pandemic, leaving nonimmune organ transplant recipients at significant risk for community exposure, infection, disease and death from wild-type infection, says Feldman, first author of the study. "Community acquisition of measles and varicella is a real risk for immunocompromised children in today's world," Feldman says. "These infections can be fatal in transplant recipients. Being able to administer live vaccines post-transplant, and provide immunity, is critical." Historically, live vaccines to guard against measles, mumps, rubella (MMR) and varicella-zoster virus (VZV) have not been recommended after solid organ transplant due to concerns about a theoretical risk of vaccine strain infection in immunocompromised children. However, the authors reported no serious adverse events observed following the live vaccination of the children enrolled in the trial between Jan. 1, 2002, and Feb. 28, 2023. Transplant recipients who participated in the trial received one to three doses of MMR vaccine and/or one to three doses of VZV vaccine. The cohort included 281 children on chronic immunosuppressive medications with a median age of 8.9 years at the time of the first post-transplant vaccine. The median time from transplant to enrollment in the study was 6.3 years. Safety data were collected after each vaccination, and antibody levels were measured at zero to three months and one year after vaccination. The majority of children developed protective antibodies following vaccination – 72% for varicella, 86% for measles, 83% for mumps and 99% for rubella. One year after vaccination, the majority of children who developed protective antibodies maintained that protection – 77% for varicella, 92% for measles, 83% for mumps and 94% for rubella. Five children developed clinical varicella, but all of their conditions resolved within one week. The findings suggest that live vaccinations may be safe and immunogenic after solid organ transplant in select pediatric recipients and can offer protection against circulating measles, mumps and varicella. Further research is needed to understand long-term maintenance of immunity after vaccination of children who receive organ transplants, as well as factors associated with immune response and clinical protection, the authors noted. Feldman reported that she is funded by a K08 grant (HS026510) from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Danziger-Isakov reported receiving clinical research support paid to her institution from AiCuris, Ansun Biopharma, Astellas Pharma, Merck, Pfizer and Takeda; advisory board fees from GlaxoSmithKline and Roche; and consultant fees from Merck outside the submitted work. About Cincinnati Children's Cincinnati Children's ranks No. 1 in the nation in U.S. News & World Report's 2023-24 listing of Best Children's Hospitals. In addition, Cincinnati Children's is recognized as one of America's Most Innovative Companies by Fortune. Nearly one-third of the health system's 18,500 employees are engaged in research, and Cincinnati Children's is one of the top two recipients of pediatric research grants from the National Institutes of Health. Additional information may be found at SOURCE Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center

Medical professionals are calling on peers to join the fight against misinformation and disinformation on social media. As medicine moves to proactive models of care, medical professionals are taking the same approach toward health misinformation on social media. During Fortune's recent Brainstorm Health event, three medically trained health influencers discussed the importance of heading off the next big medical myths. Jessica Malaty Rivera is a research program assistant at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Center for Health Security and is known to the public for her Instagram presence. Through the COVID Tracking Project, she worked throughout the pandemic to use social media, podcasts and a partnership with UNICEF to counter COVID-19 and vaccine misinformation. “So my 9-to-5 is data, and I use that even in my science communication because there is a science to it and there's evidence behind certain methods in that process,” Malaty Rivera said during the Brainstorm Health panel discussion. “One in particular is information inoculation or pre-bunking, essentially anticipating the logical fallacies, the conspiracies before they happen, as you see the news cycles spin things, and equipping folks to be prepared to make bad choices or good choices for their health.” Malaty Rivera urged institutions to train providers and educators to better be able to speak to the general public and “take science beyond the laboratory and peer-reviewed journals.” Labs are following suit and increasing public outreach through programs like iHeard St. Louis, an initiative run by the Health Communication Research Laboratory at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis. The program’s expansion to four states was announced last week and will address inaccurate information about COVID-19 prevention, vaccination and treatment. Most recently, Malaty Rivera has worked to put out a podcast miniseries to educate the public on why the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention responded the way it did early in the pandemic. She has previously worked to educate the public on the history and science of immunizations in order to weed out vaccine hesitancy at its root. “Instead of dumbing it down, it's really about trying to elevate people's literacy so they can feel empowered to make those choices,” Malaty Rivera said. “It’s not shame-based, not fear-based. It’s about using a lot of inclusive language, leaning into my identity as a woman of color, as a mom making choices for my children and all those things added to the currency of trust in my messaging.” Malaty Rivera suggests that in order to “pre-bunk,” medical professionals keep an eye out for logical fallacies such as the “appeal to nature” fallacy on social media. She thinks that even artificial intelligence could be used to warn of keywords being used so educators can be proactive. AI analysis is already being used to assess public sentiment on social media related to statin medications used to help reduce cardiovascular events. In a study published in JAMA Cardiology last week, authors asserted that AI demonstrated potential to assess public perceptions of medical information through social media.   The study analyzed 10,233 statin-related discussion posts to determine common discussion topics along with overarching themes regarding the reason for hesitancy in adopting the treatment. The sentiment analysis revealed that most discussions had a neutral (66.6%) or negative (30.8%) sentiment. Megan Ranney, M.D., is the incoming dean of the Yale School of Public Health and is known to the public for her Twitter presence. She reprimanded medical professionals for waiting until the beginning of the approval process of the COVID-19 vaccine for children under 12 to start developing messaging when anti-vax messaging for the MMR vaccine predates COVID-19 by decades. “We lost our period of time to prep the public and to 'pre-bunk' those ideas that we knew were going to come forward,” Ranney said. Ranney first entered the limelight with the social media campaign #ThisIsOurLane which sought to assert that medical professionals should speak out about injuries and deaths caused by firearm injury. She thinks medical professionals have a responsibility to educate the public on vetted public safety risks. "The Public Good Projects just released a report saying that about a third of the worst purveyors of disinformation on social media are our physicians and nurses,” Ranney said. “How do we police that? It's a question that every board of medicine, nursing boards in schools of public health need to really take on.” Along with COVID-19 misinformation, TikTok has publicly been known for videos regarding self-diagnosis of mental health disorders, most famously attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Sasha Hamdani, M.D. is a psychiatrist and chief executive officer of Focus Genie, an ADHD behavioral management platform. She was recently selected to participate in a healthcare leaders in social media roundtable at the White House. Hamdani began creating content after patients came to her using misinformed TikTok videos as evidence of the condition. She worries that while social media can be informative, the algorithms that govern them are interest-based and therefore pose the threat of entrenching users in a self-diagnosed condition. “I think that people learning more about their internal condition, finding the words to explain what's happening, finding relatable content, there's a lot of positive in that,” Hamdani said. “They’re using that information, hopefully, to go to a credible source, their physician, their therapist, to someone who can help them and guide them through this journey. I think it can get dicey when they're trying to self-manage.” Ashish Jha, M.D., coordinator for the Biden administration’s COVID-19 response team, recently called on doctors to take a leadership role to counter medical misinformation and disinformation. Jha blamed erroneous information for the lingering threat of the virus.