Can Immunizations Increase Your Lifespan? Learn what historical records show us

Is it possible to see how many lives vaccines have saved? We take a look at global and US trends, and also talk about the history of a deadly killer…tuberculosis. Find out what 2024 recommendations are so you can be up to date. Show notes with graphs: https://bit.ly/40ftEHd

We continue our series about deaths you don’t have to die from by talking about immunizations. There are behaviors that we have that can rob us of the chance to live out our full life span; in the United States this is considered 80 years for women and 75 for men. 

We now have vaccines to prevent more than 20 life-threatening diseases, helping people of all ages live longer, healthier lives. Immunization currently prevents 3.5 million to 5 million deaths every year from diseases like diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, flu, and tuberculosis. Diseases we no longer need to get sick and potentially die from if we receive immunizations against them. 

In this Episode:

• 04:41 - Recipe of the Week: Honey & Garlic Chicken
• 06:28 - Supercentenarian of the Week: Hester Ford
• 08:47 - A History of Tuberculosis - a reading from Call the Midwife
• 20:18 - Can Immunizations Save Lives? What History Shows Us
• 24:22 - 2024 Recommended Immunizations for 50 and Older
• 32:48 - "My Mirror" - Reflections on Aging
• 35:32 - Outro

Chapters

• 0:00 Intro
• 4:41 Recipe of the Week: Honey & Garlic Chicken
• 6:28 Supercentenarian of the Week: Hester Ford
• 8:47 A History of Tuberculosis - a reading from Call the Midwife
• 20:18 Can Immunizations Save Lives? What History Shows Us
• 24:22 2024 Recommended Immunizations for 50 and Older
• 32:48 "My Mirror" - Reflections on Aging
• 35:32 Outro

Transcript

Can-Immunizations-Increase-Your-Lifespan-Learn-What-Historical-Records-Show-Us

This podcast does not provide medical nor legal advice. Please listen to the complete disclosure at the end of the recording. Hello and welcome to Everyone Dies, the podcast where we talk about serious illness, dying, death, and bereavement.

I'm Marianne Matzo, a nurse practitioner, and I use my experience from working as a nurse for 46 years to help answer your questions about what happens at the end of life. And I'm Charlie Navarette, an actor in New York City, and here to offer an every-person viewpoint to our podcast. We are both here because we believe that the more you know, the better prepared you will be to make difficult decisions when a crisis hits.

Welcome to this week's show. Please relax and get yourself a glass of cider and an apple donut, and thank you for spending the next hour with Charlie and me as we talk about how vaccinations can prevent premature deaths and how tuberculosis as a disease is trying to make a comeback in the United States. Like the BBC, we see our shows offering entertainment, enlightenment, and education and divide that into three halves to address each of these goals.

Our main topic is in the second half, so feel free to fast forward to that chat-free zone. In the first half, Charlie has our recipe of the week and continues his series reporting about supercentenarian obituaries. This week, he's talking about Hester Ford who grew up tilling fields and picking cotton on a farm in South Carolina and died at the age of 115, or maybe it was 116.

There was a record problem regarding the year of her birth. In the second half, we're continuing our series about deaths you don't have to die from by talking about immunizations. If you missed the podcast introducing this topic, it's season 5, episode 23.

Essentially, there are behaviors that we have that can rob us of the chance to live out our full lifespan, which in the United States is 80 years for women and 75 for men. And in our third half, Charlie has a reflection on aging from Dr. Robert Greed. So Charlie I gotta tell you, when I was looking at the current lifespan of 80 for women and 75 for men, it gave me a moment of pause because that leaves me about, if I live the average lifespan, about 14 more years.

Is that good or bad? Well 14 isn't, I mean I can count to 14. I can imagine 14-somethings. And 75 for men, I mean you're like, you know, what, two years away? Yes Marianne, I'm two years away from 75.

What are you nuts? I'm not two years away. Sometimes it feels like I am two years away from that, yes. Who knows? You don't find that sobering? That, you know, I mean how many years is that for you? Like eight, really, honestly? In dog years? No, in Charlie years.

Yes, well I turn 68 next week. I don't know Marianne, I just don't think about it. Well, and here I am making you think about it.

Seven years, Charles. No, I'm still not going to think about it. But I have noticed, you know, more, you know, friends and acquaintances just talking about their age and talking about ailments.

And I finally, I was with a small group and I just finally said, wait a minute, we're all talking like old people here. And everyone laughed. I go, oh no, wait, I'm sorry, you're all talking like old people here.

Ailments, and I need this medication, and my doctor said this, and it's like, stop it. That's because they're not listening to our show, because we're trying to tell people you don't have to die prematurely. Well, I think, too, people just also fear death.

They don't want to talk about that. Even just simple basic things like, do you have your will? Do you have a health care proxy? Etc. Even that.

So how many years do we have to do this show before we can convert people to say that death's just another phase of life? How long you got? You know, I've got 15 years and you've got seven. In our first half, because we are talking about tuberculosis and vaccinations this week, this week our recipe is a mashup of two foods that may help with the symptoms of tuberculosis, honey and garlic. I don't know who needs to hear it, but tuberculosis is a very serious and fast-acting disease, so if you have symptoms, please see a medical professional.

That said, there's a link in the show notes for foods that can help with tuberculosis symptoms, but our two stars today are honey and garlic. Honey and garlic may provide relief from side effects caused by anti-tuberculosis drugs in people with tuberculosis. Research findings suggest that extract of garlic and garlic oil contains antibacterial, anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties.

Though garlic's allicin content is usually what gets the attention, in the case of tuberculosis, it is a sulfuric acid found in garlic that is particularly potent against the tuberculosis bacteria. As an aside, I imagine particularly potent against vampires. With garlic and vampires in mind, the funeral lunch recipe of the week is an easy honey garlic chicken.

The sauce tastes amazing and is satisfying too, as it bubbles and morphs into a perfectly balanced, savory, sweet, garlicky syrup. The sauce thickens and coats your chicken as it cooks, making for delightfully caramelized chicken pieces. Top that, Julia Child.

Bon Appetit! Our super centenarian of the week is Hester Ford. She was believed to have been born on August 15th, 1905 or 1904, on a farm in Lancaster County, South Carolina, where she grew up tilling fields and picking cotton. Theodore Roosevelt was president at the time.

She married John Ford, not the acclaimed movie director, at 14 and gave birth to the first of her 12 children at age 15. The couple moved to Charlotte around 1960 and Mrs. Ford began to work as a nanny. Mr. Ford died three years later, aged 57.

Mrs. Ford continued living in their home independently until she was 108. Her family members insisted on moving in to help her after she fell in her bathtub and bruised her ribs. Her eight daughters and four sons gave her 68 grandchildren, 125 great-grandchildren, and at least 120 great-great-grandchildren.

Mrs. Ford's family said her daily routine involved a breakfast that always included half a banana, a trip outside for fresh air, weather permitting, and sitting in her recliner looking at family albums, doing puzzles, and listening to gospel music. The link to her full obituary is in the show notes. Please go to our webpage for this week's recipe for honey garlic chicken and additional resources for this program.

Everyone Dies is offered at no cost, but is not free to produce. Please contribute what you can. Your tax-deductible gift will go directly to supporting our nonprofit journalism so that we can remain accessible to everyone.

You can also donate at www.everyonedies.org. That's every, the number one, dies, dot org. Or at our site on Patreon, www.patreon.com, and search for Everyone Dies. Mary Ann.

Thank you, Charlie. As we continue our series about deaths that you don't have to die from, we move on to immunizations. You can visit any cemetery from the early 1900s, anywhere in the world, and you will find gravestones of young people who died from infectious diseases.

Immunization is a global health success story, saving millions of lives every year. Vaccines reduce risks of getting a disease by working with your body's natural defenses to build protection. When you get a vaccine, your immune system responds.

We now have vaccines to prevent more than 20 life-threatening diseases, helping people of all ages live longer, healthier lives. Immunization currently prevents 3.5 million to 5 million deaths every year from diseases like diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, flu, and tuberculosis. Diseases we no longer need to get sick from and potentially die from if we receive immunizations against them.

Now a great example is tuberculosis. After years of declining deaths from tuberculosis in the United States, we've seen a rise in deaths over the last three years with about 9,000 deaths a year. If we look at vaccine-preventable deaths in the world, tuberculosis accounts for 2 million deaths a year.

And there's really cool graphs that are in the show notes to look at so you can see both in the world and in the United States what vaccine-preventable deaths people are still dying of that they don't need to. Now if you've ever watched the BBC series called The Midwife, I suggest you start. There are 13 seasons, so put aside some time.

It's based on the best-selling memoirs of a midwife, Jennifer Worth, and tells the stories of midwifery and families in London's East End in the 1950s. The trilogy of books is also a really good read. Now volume 3 of the trilogy has a great chapter about tuberculosis, so let me read you some of it.

And the reason that she writes this chapter is because she talks throughout the books about families who die from the disease. Tuberculosis is as old as mankind. Evidence of the disease has been found in the Neolithic burial grounds near Heidelberg, Germany, and in mummies from Egyptian tombs a thousand years BC, and Hindu writings refer to it as consumption.

Hippocrates used the word thysis to describe the cough, wasting, and ultimate destruction of the lungs. The disease is universal and bears no relation to climate. The disease is waxed and waned throughout recorded history, usually starting unnoticed, then reaching epidemic proportions, then waning as the population acquires collective immunity to the tuberculi bacillus over approximately a 200-year cycle.

In Europe and North America, it reaches epidemic proportions about 1650 to 1850, and it has been confidently concluded by medical scientists and historians that at the height of the epidemic, 90% of any population would have been infected. Of this number, 10% would have died. The lungs are the main focus of the bacillus, but they're not the only target.

The meninges that layer around your brain, bones, kidney, liver, spine, skin, intestines, eyes, practically all human tissue and organs can be and have been destroyed by tuberculosis. It was called the Great White Plague of Europe. Historically, the highest death rate from tuberculosis occurred between the ages of 15 and 30.

Tiredness, weakness, weariness, loss of weight, and color were common among the young, and there were early signs of infection unrecognized by most people. By the time coughing, fever, and lung hemorrhage occurred, the condition was called consumption, and it was too late for effective treatment. Medical science was in its infancy, and treatments were rudimentary.

The unpredictability of the course and outcome of tuberculosis had always baffled doctors. Some consumptives died within months of contracting the disease. Others recovered spontaneously with no treatment, while some lived a long and active life with intermittent bouts of the debility.

The sick begged for treatments, but the outcome of the treatment was as unpredictable as the disease itself, and probably had little effect on the course of the illness anyway. Despite that, one fashionable treatment followed another. Bleeding and blistering were common, as were leeches, plasters, poultices, cuppings, and inhalations.

Lifestyle was tackled in various courses advised. Vigorous exercise such as skiing, riding, walking, or sea bathing sometimes helped. Deep breathing was advocated, also flute playing and singing.

Other physicians insisted that rest was essential. Total bed rest for months or years on end, often in an enclosed heated room in which it was forbidden to open a window. Diet is important in any illness, and dietary fats followed each other with bewildering speed.

Some physicians advised extreme abstention, a starvation diet. Others went for diets rich in meat, offal, warm animal blood, fat, cream, fish, eggs, and milk, ass's milk, goat's milk, camel milk, sheep's milk, and human milk. Drug therapy was almost non-existent.

Ancient herbal remedies existed in every culture or tribe from time immemorial, some of which could ease symptoms, but none of which could destroy the tuberculobacillus. In the 18th and 19th century, digitalis, quinine, and mercury were used, although the universal balm and comfort was opium. The great flaw, the great flaw in all treatments was the fact that the highly contagious nature of tuberculosis was not recognized.

No special procedures in the care of dying consumptives were advised by physicians. Quite the contrary, a hot stuffy room with windows never opened was favored. Many of the testimonies of loving parent or siblings who spent whole days and nights in the same room and often in the same bed as the sufferer.

Millions of people who showed no signs of disease were carriers. Contagion, the possibility of the speed of disease from one person to another by some unseen agent, but especially by breath, was not part of medical thinking at the time. Consumption was considered to be a hereditary malformation of the lungs, and the fact that so many families were consumptive let weight to this theory.

Strangely, the equally observable fact that inside closed religious orders where monks and nuns were not related, up to a hundred percent could be found to be infected, did not prompt physicians to pursue another line of thought. In 1882, the German scientist Robert Koch, in a homemade laboratory, isolated the tuberculosis bacillus for the first time and demonstrated by animal experiments that the bacillus was responsible for the disease that had baffled generations of researchers and medical thinkers. He also demonstrated that the bacillus could cross from man to animals and vice versa, thus proving that milk from tuberculosis cows could infect human beings, especially children.

From that time onwards, massive public health programs were ordered. The public were instructed in the facts of infection and contagion, which were completely new concepts to them to grasp. The strange and novel process of sterilization had to be taught.

Limiting the spread of infection was the order of the day, and this continued for nearly 80 years. Pasteurization of milk was started in the 1920s. This was nearly 40 years after Koch had demonstrated the cross infection from animals to human, but even then a great many people would not believe it and refused to buy pasteurized milk.

TB testing of cattle was at first voluntary for farmers but became obligatory in the 1930s. In the 1920s, large notices saying spitting prohibited were displayed in all public buildings, meeting places, and on public transport, and these notices were still displayed in the 1950s and 1960s. All pubs and private bars, such as in golf and tennis clubs, had a spittoon in the bar.

The possibility of vaccination was considered. Vaccination against infectious diseases was first developed in 1796 by Edward Jenner, who had observed the link between cowpox and human smallpox. In the 1880s, when Robert Cook discovered the tuberculosis bacillus, he held out great hopes that a vaccine could be prepared from dead tuberculosis bacilli.

This should have gone well, but in the early use of the treatment, tragedy struck. A batch of the vaccine had been improperly prepared and living bacillus were injected into a large group of children, all of whom contracted tuberculosis and many of whom died. This disaster halted the use of vaccines for over 60 years, and safe and effective treatments had to wait until the 1950s when the BCG strain became available for the prevention of tuberculosis.

But a vaccine is preventative, not curative, for those already infected. In the first half of the 20th century, many curative drugs were developed and used. In the 1930s, sulfamidamide was tried.

In the 1940s, para-aminosylic acid. In the 1950s, streptomycin was the first of the antibiotics to be introduced and the one that saved millions of lives. But it was the public health programs carried out over 80 years that were chiefly responsible for success.

And by the end of the 1960s, tuberculosis was not a major cause of death in both European countries and in the Americas. So that is a far better synopsis of tuberculosis than I could ever write, and I suggest you check out this series in the books. In 1974, the World Health Organization launched the expanded program on immunization to make life-saving vaccines available to everyone worldwide.

So this year, 2024, is the 50-year anniversary of this program. So it's reasonable to ask what the public health impact of this world vaccination program was. Shotlock and colleagues used mathematical and statistical modeling to estimate the global and reachable impact of the EPI program.

Their statistical findings documented that since 1974, vaccination has prevented a hundred and fifty four million deaths, including a hundred and forty six million children younger than age five, of whom a hundred and one million were infants younger than one year. For every death deterred, 66 years of full health were gained on average, translated to 10.2 billion years of full health gained. They estimate that vaccination has accounted for 40% of the observed decline in global infant mortality.

In 2024, a child younger than 10 years is 40% more likely to survive to their next birthday relative to a hypothetical scenario of no historical vaccinations. Increased survival probability is observed even well into late adulthood. As a result of this vaccination program, it was estimated that about six million children are saved every minute.

That's about 3.2 million children per year and a hundred and fifty four million children over the course of 50 years. Yet in the United States, as a result of disruption in routine health care during the pandemic, misinformation spreading about vaccines and general distrust in public health, vaccination rates in some parts of the country are declining. The CDC reported vaccine exemption rates among kindergartners at more than 5% in Hawaii, Michigan, Nevada, and Oregon.

Idaho's vaccine exemption rate was over 12%. This puts these areas at a risk for disease outbreak. For example, measles is highly transmissible.

In 2023, the routine first dose of the measles vaccine was missed by 22 million children, up from 19.3 million in 2019. Overall vaccination coverage in adolescents remains stable across recent birth years except for a decline in HPV, the human papillovirus vaccine, which increased the risk of HPV related cancers as these kids age. One HPV related cancer is cervical cancer, which in the United States accounts for over 6,000 vaccine preventable deaths per year.

That's 6,000 women, Charlie, every year that could be alive that aren't because they didn't get that vaccine. Cervical cancer is a cancer type that women do not have to die from if vaccinated before becoming sexually active. And check out our podcast about HPV and cancer for more details.

Each year the CDC recommends a schedule of immunizations for adults and children based on recommendation from the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, made up of medical and public health experts. The CDC's recommendations are what doctors and other health care professionals use to recommend immunizations to their patients. So, drum roll please, the 2024 immunizations for adults 50 and older are COVID-19.

The 2024 recommendations include one or more doses of the updated COVID-19 vaccine, and that updated vaccine came out in mid-September. The 2023-2024 formulation of the COVID vaccine protects against XBB 1.5 COVID-19 variant, which is a descendant from the Omicron variant. The second is influenza, the second vaccine.

The 2024 recommendations include an annual flu shot for most adults. Multiple flu vaccines are available. Most healthy adults can choose between a nasal spray vaccine and an injection vaccine.

The CDC recommends a high-dose flu vaccine for adults ages 65 years and older. Third vaccine is the respiratory syncytial virus, RSV. RSV is a common respiratory virus that could cause serious illness in certain groups, including infants and older adults.

The single dose of the RSV vaccine is recommended for adults ages 60 and older who are at an increased risk for severe RSV infection due to certain underlying health conditions. The vaccine is also recommended for pregnant people whose babies are going to be born during RSV season, typically September through January. And lastly, the mpox vaccine.

Mpox is a virus that's the same family as smallpox and chickenpox. Most people who are infected with mpox have mild illness, though serious complications can occur. The mpox vaccine is recommended for anyone at risk for mpox infection.

Although many cases of mpox occur in men who have sex with men, anyone who has been in close contact with someone infected with mpox is at risk. There's a few other recommendations, like a shingles vaccine. Shingles is really painful, so if you haven't had it, please think about this vaccine.

Shingles is a painful rash caused by reactivation of the virus that causes chickenpox. Two doses of the shingles vaccine are recommended for adults 50 years and older and adults who are immunocompromised. The pneumonia vaccine is, you know, pneumonia is a lung infection that can cause severe disease in certain groups.

The pneumococcal vaccine to prevent bacterial pneumonia is recommended for some adults 65 years and older. Tetanus. Tetanus is also called lockjaw.

It's a bacterial disease that can cause difficulty opening the mouth and swallowing. Adults should receive a tetanus booster every 10 years, and you can get tetanus from any kind of scratch from a rusted piece of metal. So depending on the kind of work that you do, or volunteer work that you do, or maybe you're just clumsy, make sure you stay up to date on your tetanus.

Now, immunization is a key to primary healthcare. It's an indisputable human right and one of the best health investments money can buy. Vaccines are also critical to the prevention and control of infectious disease outbreaks.

They underpin global health security and are a vital tool in the battle against antimicrobial resistance. Make good choices as you consider immunizations because the life you save can be your own. Charles, any questions? Yes, please explain to me why people still don't get their shots, their immunizations.

Just, you know, save your life, save the life of your child if you made the decision not to have your child immunized. Well, I can remember my babies were little and taking them in for their first set of immunizations and even as a nurse I was like reading up about it and of course when they, you have to give consent, they go through the whole list of what potentially, in a very small number of children, could happen. And it's your baby and you think, oh my god, these are possibilities.

But you need to weigh that against the possibilities, greater possibility of infectious disease. Yeah. And so my kids were vaccinated.

Then there was that Charlatan study that has been disproved a million times over where the researcher falsified the results about autism and immunizations. It's not true. It, he came out and said it's not true.

The numbers were, the study was repeated and it was shown to not be true. But people have grasped onto that study as, I don't know, a way to justify their fear or their thought that this is going to happen to my child. And it's, it's coincidental that at, for some kids you don't see the symptoms of autism until they're a little bit older and around times when they might be getting vaccines.

So it's easy to tell yourself this is why this happened. There's also since a certain president that we had, and we're not going to talk politics, and the mistrust that's been fostered regarding really anybody with an education and against Dr. Fossey and all of that with COVID just sort of entrenched a whole group of people to think that what we tell them isn't true. And that mistrust really, really is the cause of deaths.

I mean, I can remember when Meatloaf, you know, during COVID-19 said, I'm not ever getting that vaccine. There's no way you can make me get that vaccine. And unfortunately, he died from the disease.

And so many people who like came out and said, I'm adamantly, don't do this. This is horrible. And then they died from the disease.

And so when we talk about preventable deaths, that's what we're talking about. It didn't have to happen. We could still have Meatloaf's rock and roll.

And I love Meatloaf's music. So I'm sad that he made that choice. And so many others made that choice.

But it's not a choice that I'm willing to make. And I hope people will kind of come back to trusting science and numbers again. Yeah.

Yeah. Oh, dear. Okay.

In our third half, this week, I have a reflection about aging from the Annals of Internal Medicine titled My Mirror by Robert A. Green, MD. Search your face in the mirror each morning, neck up, neck down, side turn, side turn. I know it's not vanity, not the wrinkles themselves for which you search.

It is for the signs, the first signs, the first tracks, the first intimations of change, of age, of death, of disillusioned mortality. I smile. I know the announcement will not come for me this way, bit by bit.

Not for me. Not a minuscule omen, but a bang, an epiphany, a sign of blood, a flash of pain, a lump of tissue, a trumpet call. And then today, a periodic examination with the radiologist.

I look at the IVP, the CAT scan, my belly, my abdomen, my organs. It is just a renal cyst. But there are the stutures from my hernia repair and residual pantopeak from my myelogram and lipping around the spine.

I have watched you search your face in the mirror each morning, neck up, neck down, side turn, side turn. I know it's not vanity, not the wrinkles themselves for which you search. It is for the signs, the first signs, the first tracks, the first intimations of change, of age, of death, of disillusioned mortality.

I smile. I know the announcement will not come for me this way, bit by bit. Not for me.

Not a minuscule omen, but a bang, an epiphany, a sign of blood, a flash of pain, a lump of tissue, a trumpet call. And then today, a periodic examination with the radiologist. I look at the IVP, the CAT scan, my belly, my abdomen, my organs.

It is just a renal cyst. But there are sutures from my hernia repair and residual pantopeak from my myelogram and lipping around the spine and residual barium in diverticula in the bladder floor raised by an enlarged prostate. My x-rays, my organs, my belly, bit by bit.

That's it for this episode. Stay tuned for the continuing saga of Everyone Dies, and thank you for listening. This is Charlie Navarette, and from novelist Anna Huang, we always end up where we're meant to be.

And I'm Marianne Matzo, and we'll see you next week. Remember, every day is a gift. This podcast does not provide medical advice.

All discussion on this podcast, such as treatments, dosages, outcomes, charts, patient profiles, advice, messages, and any other discussion are for informational purposes only, and are not a substitute for professional medical advice or treatment. Always seek the advice of your primary care practitioner or other qualified health providers with any questions that you may have regarding your health. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in it because of something you have heard from this podcast.

If you think you may have a medical emergency, call your doctor or 911 immediately. Everyone Dies does not recommend or endorse any specific tests, practitioners, products, procedures, opinions, or other information that may be mentioned in this podcast. Reliance on any information provided in this podcast by persons appearing on this podcast at the invitation of Everyone Dies or by other members is solely at your own risk.