Vaccines, mental health topics at Dodge County forum

Vaccines and mental health issues were topics at last Saturday’s Rural Health Forum at The Midway building on the Dodge County Fairgrounds in Kasson. The event was sponsored by the Dodge and Olmsted County Farmers Union in cooperation with Dodge County Public Health.

Featured speakers at the event included Dr. Robert M. Jacobson of the Mayo Clinic and Ted Matthews, a mental health practitioner who has more than 30 years of experience in counseling in rural areas.

Jacobson is a pediatrician at the Mayo Clinic in the Children’s Pediatrics and Community Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine Departments. His interests are in general pediatrics, childhood and adolescent vaccines, vaccine delivery and effectiveness and adverse consequences, pediatric clinical epidemiology, primary care and patient education.

Vaccines, he told those attending the forum, have been a public health success. The most successful vaccine of all, he says has been smallpox. In 1920, he said, there were 110,672 cases in the United States. In 2019 there were no cases. The disease has, in fact, been eradicated on the plant and the U.S. stopped giving the vaccine in 1974. 

For other diseases, he said, in 1934 there were 265,269 cases of whooping cough and in 2019 there were 15,662 cases. Diptheria went from 30,508 cases in 1938 to two cases in 2019. Paralytic polio went from 21,269 in 1952 to 0 in 2019. Measles decreased from 763,094 in 1962 to 1,287 in 2019. Chickenpox went from 5,358,595 in 1988 to 102,128 in 2017.

One of the problems of the success of vaccines, he said, is when the disease goes away people don’t think about it and may become complacent about the disease and its consequences. For a variety of reasons this is happening, he said, specifically in the number of measles cases in the U.S.

Despite concerns by some over the safety of vaccines, he said, they are actually one of the most tested items in medicine.

Current vaccines practices rely on the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) to review and recommend vaccines on the basis of effectiveness, safety, need and lack of alternatives.

Physicians use the single, standard vaccine schedule the ACIP publishes, catch children up on missed and late vaccines as soon as possible, apply only the true contraindications and precautions, use every visit to review vaccines due and vaccinate, provide the parent the official Vaccine Information Statement and report adverse events to a central federal authority, VAERS. 

Before being approved recommended vaccines must be approved for effectiveness, safety, necessity and lack of alternatives.

Prescription drugs, he said, are only reviewed for effectiveness and safety; over-the-counter drugs are sometimes reviewed for effectiveness and safety and vitamins, minerals and nutritional supplements are not reviewed by any agency.

Most reasons for not vaccinating, he said, are false adding that there is no such things as the immune system being “overwhelmed” by vaccines.

In response to a question on where to find factual information on vaccines, he recommended the website voicesforvaccines.org. It is an independent, not government site, with correct, scientific and readable information, he said.

In the second presentation, Matthews said that mental health concerns are important for all people, not just for famers and those in rural areas. People often equate mental health with mental illness but that is not the case. He advised looking at it as health, not as something drastically wrong.

In the 30 years he has been working in the field of rural mental health, he said, it has gone from being a mostly male audience to now 50-50 male and female. Communication is often the problem, he said, and individuals need to learn to respect others. Agreeing and respecting are not the same thing, he said. If people respect each other they can move on and communicate and find common ground.

Anger, for example, he said, does not exist by itself. A person needs to focus on what emotion created the anger and deal with that.

Being kind to oneself is also important, he said. “If I’m nice to me, I have the ability to be nice to you.”

The forum also included over a dozen exhibitors who had information on a variety of health topics including farm safety, hearing and blood pressure checks, health insurance and family health. Among the exhibitors were Dodge County Public Health, Center Clinic, Kasson-Mantorville FFA, University of Minnesota Extension, Farmers Union Agency, Wellness on Wheels and the Hormel Institute.