Not Just Infection Prevention: How Vaccines Benefit Your Health – West Tennessee Healthcare

August is National Immunization Awareness Month. With vaccines in the news a lot these days, we want to focus on the many benefits of vaccines, which go beyond infection prevention.

“Vaccines are most known as a tool for preventing illness,” says Elizabeth Graves, NP, family nurse practitioner with West Tennessee Medical Group Primary Care | Thomsen Farms. “They’re incredibly effective for preventing infections, but also help protect your health in other ways, now and in the future.”

The World Health Organization notes that we now have vaccines to prevent more than 30 life-threatening diseases and infections. In the United States, we have 15 different childhood vaccines, some with multiple doses, along with other vaccines recommended in adulthood or regularly throughout life.

Vaccines are recommended fo important reasons—to prevent serious illness and save lives. If you ever played Oregon Trail as a kid, you might have died of diptheria, which is a highly contagious bacterial infection. These days, that disease is rare in the US thanks to the diphtheria vaccine.

Other diseases that once ravaged the US, such as polio, are now nearly or totally eradicated thanks to vaccination. Polio, for example, was considered eliminated in the United States in 1979, less than 25 years after the polio vaccine was first developed.

Vaccines work by building antigens and teaching the immune system how to fend off infection, but the benefits don’t end there. Getting a vaccine today can protect you for years to come.

Defense Against Complications

When it comes to protecting your health, vaccines play a multifaceted role. While many diseases are less common than before, they’re still out there. As we’ve learned from ongoing measles outbreaks across the country, when enough people don’t get vaccinated against a specific disease, it can spread and take root in communities.

That’s why vaccination against these rare diseases is still important—to keep them rare. No one wants to return to a time when diphtheria raged, or when polio caused many people to die or become paralyzed.

This leads us to the second benefit of vaccines: protection from the secondary effects of a viral or bacterial infection. While there’s no doubt that the respiratory infection caused by diphtheria was unpleasant, the complications from the disease often made it fatal.

Complications from disease aren’t always fatal, but they can be long-lasting and significant. We’ve seen that evidenced most recently from COVID-19. Even cases that were mild or asymptomatic sometimes led to ‘long COVID,’ effects from the disease lasting for months and even years.

Being vaccinated doesn’t always prevent infection, but it can help protect the body from the more serious effects of a disease, lowering the risk of hospitalization and death.

Doses of Heart Protection

When you think about infections, you might not think about your heart, but you should. Many bacterial and viral infections cause major inflammation in the body, which can worsen existing heart problems and lead to the development of others.

According to the American Heart Association:

• Approximately 20% of adults hospitalized with respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) experience heart problems such as heart attacks or heart failure.
• COVID-19 increases the risk of arrhythmia, heart failure, coronary disease, heart attack, and stroke.
• Shingles increases the risk of both hemorrhagic and ischemic strokes.
• The risk of having a heart attack is six times higher in the week after someone is diagnosed with the flu.

Yes, you read that correctly. Even the flu, a common respiratory illness, can pose a danger to your heart. That’s why health experts recommend getting the flu shot each year.

In addition to the flu shot, other vaccines can also help protect your heart. Talk with your primary care provider about what vaccines are recommended based on your age and other factors.

A Shot at Cancer Prevention

This benefit of vaccines might take you by surprise. Two vaccines can be used to lower the risk of specific types of cancer: the HPV vaccine and the hepatitis B vaccine.

Human papillomavirus, or HPV, causes multiple kinds of cancer. It’s the most common cause of cervical cancer but also a major cause of anal, oral, throat, and genital cancers. The HPV vaccine works by preventing HPV infection, which in turn prevents the cancer-causing changes associated with HPV.

Because HPV is a sexually transmitted infection, it’s best to be vaccinated before becoming sexually active. The HPV vaccine is recommended for both boys and girls beginning as young as age 9, but can be given to anyone through age 26. It may also provide some protection for those ages 27 to 45, so talk with your provider if you haven’t been previously vaccinated.

Hepatitis B is a liver disease that can lead to chronic illness or liver cancer. The hepatitis B vaccine, which can help prevent this infection, is given in three doses to children between birth and 18 months and may also be given to adults who are at high risk of the disease. Talk with your provider about whether you would benefit from the vaccine as an adult.

As we move into the future, vaccines may play a larger role in helping prevent and even treat cancer. Vaccines as a therapeutic tool for treating cancer work similarly to those used to prevent infections—instead of teaching the immune system to clear a virus and prevent disease, a therapeutic cancer vaccine teaches the immune system to recognize and kill cancer cells. The potential is endless!

Regular checkups with a primary care provider can help you stay up to date on recommended vaccines. Need a provider? Find one here.