LS 73 - The Importance of Adult Vaccines and Health with Dr Regina Benjamin, US Surgeon General Under Barack Obama

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It's my pleasure to welcome Dr. Regina Benjamin to the show. She is the 18th U.S. surgeon General of the United States under President Barack Obama and former Vice admiral in the U.S. public Health Service Commission Corps. Regina, welcome. How are you?

Good, thank you. How are you?

Good. It's a pleasure to have you on the show today. I'd like to start with a little bit of background on the FDA and their role in regulating Big Pharma and so forth. Any of your thoughts as it relates to FDA involvement?

So basically, the FDA is in place as a federal agency to protect the public and make sure that the products and things given to the public are safe and effective and that no harm is going to come to the general public and to protect the American people. One of the things for me is prevention, and my whole career has been on prevention. And it's been the foundation of my work as a family physician and my work as Surgeon General. And in fact, we released the first ever national prevention strategy and wanted to talk today about preventing older Americans from getting pneumatical pneumonia. And as you know, pneumonia is just an infection of the lungs that is caused by germ or bacteria, and it can occur in anyone, any age. But as we start to get older, our immune system weakens, making us more at risk for illnesses like pneumonia. So I've teamed up with Pfizer to increase the awareness and the importance of adult vaccinations. We often know this is back to school time, and we think about kids getting their vaccines, getting ready to go back to school, college kids getting vaccinated. But we don't think about adults needing to get vaccinations. And so we really want to raise the awareness and make sure adults over the age of 65 particularly know that it's important to get your vaccinations, too.

Yeah, very good point. We're not talking about adult vaccinations at all, unless it's the flu vaccine. What vaccinations are you talking about and how often should we be thinking about this?

So we're talking about Vaccinations, like you mentioned, the flu, we have shingles, we have tetanus vaccination, but in particularly pneumococcal pneumonia. And the reason for pneumococcal pneumonia is the fact that there are many different types of pneumonia. But the one that can be very difficult to overcome, the one that can have serious consequences if you get it, even death, is pneumococcal pneumonia. And it's the one that we have a vaccine to prevent. So if there's a way to prevent it from the first place, that's what we want to do. And there are certain communities that we really want to emphasize, particularly the African American and Hispanic communities, the communities of color. And the reason is most Americans don't realize that we need to do adult vaccinations. But these communities in particular, African American community, for example, were more likely than others to get chronic illnesses like high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes. And that puts us at risk, a higher risk for pneumonia and other things. So in spite of that higher risk, our rates of vaccination are lower than we'd like it to be. In African American community, it's less than 50% of adults that's 65 and older have gotten a pneumococcal vaccination. And Hispanic is less. Even worse, it's less than 40%. So we really want to raise the awareness about the importance of getting your adult vaccination.

What specifically is the reason we have to be concerned with this along racial lines? Is it just an awareness issue or is there actually a genetic issue at play, or is it something else altogether?

There's no known genetics, and like I said, anyone can get pneumonia, anyone that's at high risk, anyone that can get it at any age. But this is more of an awareness. And as we started out in the beginning, most people don't realize adults even have vaccinations. And so it's really an awareness. It's also the fact that there are other barriers that's been in place in these communities, barriers like economics and could you afford to pay for the vaccination? So now we have things in place such as the Affordable Care act has allowed for Medicare to pay for pneumococcal vaccinations without a co pay. Many insurances are now covering it without a co pay. And. And so that barrier is less. We try to go out and have it accessible in places that's easy to get to. So your doctor's office, your pharmacy, community clinics that it's available. So making that barrier of access and transportation, less so other things that just making it easier to be healthy. And I think that our role, particularly in government and as health leaders, is to give good information to the American people, give you the tools to help you make good decisions and the tools to become healthier. Then it's your responsibility to use them if you want to or not. It's not our role to tell you exactly what to do and how to do it, but it is to give you that information. And so this pneumococcal pneumonia vaccination is one of the tools that you'll have and one of the things you can do to protect yourself and your family.

Sure. Do you want to address the vaccination debate more widely for a moment? A lot of parents become upset and debate this issue with schools and so forth requiring vaccinations. Any thoughts there?

In general, we have become a society where we don't trust anything. And so you're seeing that lack of trust there. We need to build that trust back up and including in the medical community. What I'd say particularly important in this debate is that it's much more dangerous and much more serious not to get vaccinated than it is to get vaccinated. And your risk. We've done multiple things to make the vaccine safe, as safe as possible right now. We put things in place. But the real thing is that the risk of not being vaccinated, you can put yourself, your children, your family at risk if you don't get vaccinated. For example, you may be a healthy adult or a healthy child and you're doing fine, but you're carrying around this germ that you took and you gave to Grandma, and Grandma couldn't overcome it because her immune system's weaker. She gets sick and she dies. You would never forgive yourself to know that she got it from you, whereas you wouldn't have it if you had gotten vaccinated. So that vaccination doesn't just protect you individually, it also protects your loved ones. The last thing I'd say about that conversation is that many of the people who are against the vaccination, they do their homework, they start to read and they try to understand. But what they don't get is that they've never seen their child with whooping cough who couldn't get their breath. They're gasping for air and could not get their last breath. And to watch a child who can't breathe die because they can't get a breath. Recent generations have not seen that. Older ones have and they understood it. And that's because we've hopefully we've had good public health in place, we have good prevention measures, and I hope they'll never see it.

Yeah, we kind of take this for granted and don't understand the seriousness of things that we haven't seen or experienced or at least heard secondhand, even from people. So that makes a lot of sense to me. Tell us about some of the things that you worked on and were very involved with as the 18th U.S. surgeon General.

So prevention was my the foundation of everything we did and still do as former surgeon General. And so I mentioned earlier, released the first ever national prevention strategy. And that strategy is roadmap, if you will, to a healthier and more healthy nation. And so things we can do to put in place. And basically it's based on prevention. Some of the other reports, of course, as any surgeon general, I had several reports on tobacco and not smoking and particularly smoking in youth and young adults. And to try to get young adults not to stick up the habit of smoking. And smoking itself is one of the risk factors that predisposes you to getting pneumonia at certain times. So you want to make sure you don't smoke. We have exercise, particularly walking, exercising, eating right. One of the other reports that I did that was very popular was breastfeeding, encouraging women who want to breastfeed and giving them support. And the benefits around breastfeeding, because there are so many benefits, not only to the baby, but to the mother as well. And a baby who's breastfed for the first six months of life is less likely to become obese. The mother is protected against breast cancer and ovarian cancer, all those things. And so we need to support women who want to. If they don't want to, that's their decision, that's their choice. But if they do, you know, people who work, for example, it's okay to take a break to get a cigarette smoking break, but it's not okay to get a break to breastfeed or pump. So we just wanted to be raising that awareness. And there are other issues all around prevention. And that's why today, talking about preventing how to Prevent adults over 65 from getting pneumococcal pneumonia is so important to me. And I think anything we can do to save lives, to have Americans to be healthier and live healthier and longer active lives, is important. And that's why this initiative so important to raise that awareness.

Very good point. And you know, as we wrap up, you mentioned breastfeeding and the Ties to obesity. But can you address the obesity epidemic more broadly? I mean, Americans are just getting more and more obese, and it is so unhealthy. Michelle Obama has made many statements about food, the food supply and gardening and so forth, and I think that's great to raise awareness there. But this is a massive, pardon the pun, epidemic, isn't it?

It is. And we're seeing our entire nation, as you said, get more and more obese. And these initiatives that we're talking about, like first lady's let's move initiative, they're starting to work. You're seeing younger kids really into it, being active and moving more. You know, the phenomenon of Pokemon goal is to get kids moving, and it's getting them walking, keeping, get them out of places. They're moving now. And so things like that you're seeing to help get our society moving. We have seen the numbers of children that are obese has not risen. They're starting to level off. And even at some age, groups starting to decline a little bit. So at least we know something's working. And so we want to keep up that. The other report I did was Walking Everybody Walk Campaign now trying to get Americans to walk more, to walk for health, walk for fun, walk for transportation. And if we can just get America moving and walking, that'll also help, you know, other nations, you'll see people walking all the time. We don't do it as much. And this Everybody Walk campaign has been a nationwide thing to get walkable communities. So those sort of things. I think as we raise this awareness, people are starting to take it on as their own and starting to do things and holding people accountable, holding their elected officials. I want sidewalks to be able to walking in a safe place. And it's a culture that we as citizens will do. You know, the government won't do it for us. We got to do it ourselves. And I think we're seeing some of that start to happen.

Yeah, and a lot of that really comes down to urban planning and maybe being more flexible with zoning restrictions and so forth at the local government level so that we can build walkable communities so that the stores are nearby and it encourages people to walk rather than have to get in a car and drive across the suburbs to go to the store or the coffee shop or whatever. Right.

And that's exactly right. And that's what the national prevention strategy is about. It's not just one thing. It's going to be a number of things. It's going to be healthy foods, it's going to be clean air, making sure that businesses are involved, communities are involved, churches. Everyone is going to have to play a role in this. And even when we're talking about pneumococcal pneumonia and adult vaccinations, we want everyone to be aware of it, to raise that awareness that your church members who are over 65 make sure they got their pneumonia shots, that they talk to their doctor, make sure that their adult vaccinations are up to date. So that's part of that whole prevention strategy, the prevention idea of keeping us as a healthy nation. A healthy and fit nation.

Yeah. Fantastic. Do you have a website that you would like to give out or a Twitter account you'd like to share with our audience?

The website for this is known.

Pneumonia.Com and you can find more information there. You can also go to cdc. I have a Twitter. Regina Benjamin, you're welcome there. We'll put some stuff there as well. I would basically say talk to your doctor and make sure all of your immunizations are up to date and that it's customized for you as an individual because we're not all made alike and we all have our uniqueness. And I think that's the beauty of medicine, the beauty of being able to talk to your doctor, your nurse practitioner, your clinician, and personalizing that care.

Fantastic. Dr. Regina Benjamin, thank you for joining us.

Thank you.

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