I see it’s recommended for teens, and also adults over 50, but apparently no mention of the age gap in between?
Also, vaccines can only prevent virus-related stuff, not bacterial?
if I remember correctly they last 20-30 years or so that middle period would be covered
I don’t think this is true. There are vaccines that protect against typhoid fever, which is a bacterial infection.
Not really. They only began recommending meningitis vaccines for all teens in 2005, so there are millions of us under the age of 50 who have never been vaccinated against it. However, most of us aren’t sharing living quarters with lots and lots of other students or members of the military, so our risk of exposure is a lot lower than the typical teen or early twenty-something.
Although vaccines against viral diseases such as polio and mumps were developed earlier and used far more broadly than anti-bacterial vaccines, the latter do exist.
For example, effective vaccines exist against Streptococcus pneumonia (the most common cause of pneumonia), Haemophilus influenzae (protecting against both meningitis and a devastating epiglottitis), Neisseria meningitidis (which causes a form of meningitis that is, at once, potentially catastrophic and highly contagious).
Remember also that the vaccine can be against the toxin produced by the bacteria and not the bacteria itself, e.g. tetanus, diphtheria.
Although the term “vaccine” is commonly used as a general term for all antigen preparations for infectious disease prevention, a pendant might point out that a biological used to prevent a bacterial infection/disease is actually a bacterin.
Also tetanus and diptheria.