Campaign Started to Encourage Routine Immunization of Adults

Government health agencies and private physicians, saying that routine immunization has “virtually eliminated many vaccine-preventable diseases” among children in the United States but has not been extended to another vulnerable group, launched a drive Wednesday to vaccinate adults.

“Immunization isn’t just kid stuff,” Dr. Robert H. Moser, executive vice president of the American College of Physicians, said in releasing a new handbook for physicians on adult immunization.

Effective Vaccines “There are safe, effective vaccines against a number of diseases that we see in adult patients. We want every physician to get in the habit of routinely considering what vaccines would protect patients against those diseases,” he said.

Adults are stricken by tetanus, rubella, diphtheria, influenza, pneumococcal pneumonia, hepatitis B and measles, according to representatives of the 60,000-member physicians’ group, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the federal Centers for Disease Control.

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the allergy institute, said that two-thirds of the tetanus cases in this country occur among persons older than 50--those “least likely to have been immunized as children.” And, according to the new handbook, 88% of the known hepatitis B cases in 1982 occurred in persons older than 20, and an estimated 20% of young adults are susceptible to measles--a disease that could lead to greater complications for adults than for children.

“Internists simply have not been trained to think ‘immunization’ in the same way pediatricians have,” said Dr. Alan Hinman, director of the division of immunization at CDC’s Center for Prevention Services. If they did, he said, the diseases could be virtually eliminated.

Conquest of Polio Cited “Thirty years ago, we had 20,000 cases of polio a year; now, we have virtually no cases of polio,” Hinman said. “We’ve had 500,000 cases a year of measles as recently as 20 years ago. Now, we’re close to eliminating measles in this country.”

Fauci said that scientists are trying to develop a single vaccine that will protect against several diseases, such as hepatitis B, influenza, herpes, rabies and malaria. Currently, no vaccine against the herpes virus is available.