While most Canadian parents ensure that their children are immunized on time, some are hesitant about vaccination, delay vaccinations or outright refuse recommended vaccines. This practice point offers clinicians evidencebased guidance on how to work with vaccine-hesitant parents, especially those with safety concerns. Suggested steps include: understanding the specific parental vaccine concern...

Hepatitis B virus (HBV) causes life-threatening liver disease. It is transmitted through a horizontal route or a mother-to-infant route, and the latter is the major route in endemic areas. Prevention of HBV infection by immunization is the best way to eliminate HBV-related diseases. The HBV vaccine is the first human vaccine using a viral antigen from infected persons, which is safe and effecti...

The seasonal influenza vaccine is currently the most effective preventive modality against influenza infection. Nasopharyngeal samples of vaccinated and non-vaccinated patients presenting with Influenza-like-illness (ILI) were collected from over 20 outpatient clinics located in different geographic parts of Israel and were tested for the presence of influenza viruses (influenza A and influenza...

W ith health officials expanding their flu shot recommendations to cover more age groups and with a record 132 million doses of flu vaccine expected to be available for the upcoming flu season, it’s a busy time of year for family medicine practices everywhere. Once flu season hits, there’s rarely time to stop and look up the fine points of coding flu shots. So as you prepare to provide this ...

Over the past 20 years most of the efforts in HIV vaccine development have focused on sterilizing immunity by targeting the Envelope protein (Env). However, results from preclinical and clinical trials have been largely disappointing [1–11]. Therefore, current vaccine strategies are not only aimed at preventing virus infection but also at blocking virus replication and disease onset. In particu...

BACKGROUND Recruitment of low- and middle-income country volunteers from most-at-risk populations in HIV vaccine trials is essential to vaccine development. In India, men who have sex with men (MSM) are at disproportionately high risk for HIV infection and an important population for trial recruitment. Investigations of willingness to participate (WTP) in HIV vaccine trials have focused predomi...

Many everyday decisions require trade-offs between immediate and delayed benefits. Although much research has assessed discounting of delayed outcomes by using hypothetical scenarios, little research has examined whether these discounting measures correspond to real-world behavior. Three studies examined the relationship between scenario measures of time preference and preventive health behavio...

The role of worry, regret, and perceived risk in preventive health decisions was explored in a longitudinal questionnaire study on influenza vaccination among 428 university employees. The study yielded 3 main findings. First, ratings of anticipated worry and regret were stronger predictors of vaccination than perceived risk and mediated the effect of risk on vaccination. Second, the anticipate...

Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb), the etiologic agent of tuberculosis (TB), causes 1.8M deaths annually. The current vaccine, BCG, has failed to eradicate TB leaving 25% of the world's population with latent Mtb infection (LTBI), and 5-10% of these people will reactivate and develop active TB. An efficient therapeutic vaccine targeting LTBI could have an enormous impact on global TB incidence, ...

Patients with rheumatic diseases are more susceptible to infection, due to the underlying disease itself or to its treatment. The rheumatologist should prevent infections in those patients, vaccination being one preventive measure to be adopted. Yellow fever is one of such infectious diseases that can be avoided.The yellow fever vaccine is safe and effective for the general population, but, bei...