Category: vaccine

3 Uses for ZIP Codes to Stay Informed

A person takes mail from mailbox.

July 1 is U.S. ZIP Code Day. The U.S. Postal Service (USPS)—then called the U.S. Post Office Department—introduced the Zone Improvement Plan (ZIP) code in 1963. USPS’ purpose was to facilitate the automatic sorting of mail and reduce the number of steps a piece of mail would go through to reach a recipient.(1) Since then, Read More >

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Five Things You Need to Know About Flu Season

Sick boy with thermometer laying in bed and mother hand taking temperature. Mother checking temperature of her sick son who has thermometer in his mouth. Sick child with fever and illness while resting in bed.

“It’s the least-fun, viral time of the year…” The indicators that CDC uses to track U.S. flu activity have been high this season (2019-2020). That’s the bad news. The good news is that the indicators that track severity–hospitalizations and deaths–are not high at this point (January 2020) in the season. Lots of people are catching Read More >

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10 Years Later: The Lasting Impacts of the H1N1 Flu Pandemic Response

This highly magnified transmission electron microscopic (TEM) image depicted numbers of virions from a novel influenza H1N1 isolate.

As coincidence would have it, Dr. Stephen Redd was wrapping up an influenza (flu) pandemic planning meeting on April 15, 2009, when someone on the phone reported that a new (or novel) influenza A virus had infected a 10-year-old boy in California. Things moved fast after that. The Response Two days after CDC confirmed the Read More >

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Personal Protective Actions You Can Take in a Flu Pandemic

Period photo of a flu patients during the 1918 influenza pandemic.

Every fall and winter the United States experiences epidemics of seasonal influenza (flu). Sometimes a flu pandemic occurs due to a new flu virus that spreads and causes illnesses around the world. We cannot predict when a flu pandemic will occur, but over the past 100 years, we have documented four flu pandemics resulting in Read More >

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The 1918 Flu Pandemic: Why It Matters 100 Years Later

100 years ago, an influenza (flu) pandemic swept the globe, infecting an estimated one-third of the world’s population and killing at least 50 million people. The pandemic’s death toll was greater than the total number of military and civilian deaths from World War I, which was happening simultaneously.  At the time, scientists had not yet Read More >

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5 Things You Might Not Know About Human Papillomavirus

Portrait Of Grandmother With Daughter And Granddaughter

Human papillomavirus (HPV) is a common virus that infects both women and men. Although most HPV infections go away on their own, infections that don’t go away (persist) can cause changes in the cells and lead to cancer. With HPV vaccine, we have a powerful tool to prevent most of these cancers from ever developing. Read More >

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