I think I’ve had all of the childhood vaccinations but am close to sixty years old now, so they’re decades in the past. Would there be any harm in getting a measles any of the other usual ones, now as a precaution and sort of booster?
If you only got the single dose version of the childhood measles vaccine, a booster now is a good idea. Tetanus is one that wears off, but waiting until after you step in a nail or cut your hand cutting onions isn’t the end of the world.
With measles in the news, adults are wondering, do I need a vaccine booster?
“If you have been vaccinated with two doses of vaccine as per routine, you have a 95-plus percent chance of being completely protected throughout your life,” Schaffner says.
But public health experts say there are some adults who should consider getting revaccinated. That includes older adults who were born after 1957 and were vaccinated before 1968.
That’s because early versions of the measles vaccine were made from an inactivated (killed) virus, which didn’t work particularly well, Offit says. That’s why the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that anyone vaccinated before 1968 get at least one dose of the live attenuated vaccine.
–snip–
Schaffner says if you’re not sure of your immunity or vaccination status, there’s no harm in getting a shot.
You can probably get a titer test and see what your immunity various diseases and see if you need to re-vaccinate. But I don’t know what those costs.
This method is not reliable; if you have not been exposed by a pathogen such as Morbillivirus hominis recently, you will not have detectable levels of antibodies in your blood even though you may have a robust immune response. As @snowthx notes, if you’ve had the routine two-step inoculation with the live attenuated vaccine you should have robust immunity throughout your lifetime absent of an immunocompromised medical condition. However, getting another booster later in life (or really, at any time off-schedule) is very unlikely to pose a serious risk of adverse reactions unless you are pregnant, immune-compromised, or are allergic to some non-viral component of the measles or MMR vaccine:
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Fwiw, i had a titer test of my measles antibodies in my late 50s, and despite having no known recent exposure, i tested positive (immune). But yes, there are also false negatives.
I am in that cohort that had mixed vaccines available, and had a weird enough reaction to my last measles shot that my mom got me a medical exemption when most of my cohort was revaccinated. So i was shy of just getting another vaccine. Although, reading about the shots available, some of what my cohort got was a less effective killed vaccine and some was an inadequately attenuated live vaccine, and probably, i just got a mild case of measles from that one. Another shot would probably have been harmless.
Do you all have complete records of which vaccines you received and when? I don’t, partly because I think my parents weren’t detailed oriented and partly because my insurer and primary care provider changed over the decades. So there is no one source of truth.
Me? I have no records of vaccines before about 30 years ago.
From the article:
I fall into this category, so I am planning to get an MMR booster in the near future—not just because I frequently travel internationally but also because of the resurgence of measles here in the U.S.
I fall into that cohort had to get a booster in high school, and then again in college (I assume because I switched high schools for my senior year and the records of the previous booster didn’t follow) with no adverse reactions other than some moderate tenderness around the injection site for a day. That was probably spaced about two years, give or take.
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I was born in '54 - can’t recall if I had the shot or the measles. Is it a vaccine routinely given in boot camp? I might have gotten it then.
My situation is actually a bit more complicated. My early childhood shot records were all lost, so I was required to get a single MMR vaccine when I moved to a new school system in the early ‘80s (along with the whole polio series).
So assuming I was properly vaccinated at birth, I’ve probably had two measles vaccines in my life. But no way to tell for sure. So I figured getting another booster now (40 years later) couldn’t hurt in light of the current measles resurgence.
That’s basically my question; are there any circumstances in which too many vaccines can hurt?
Well, talk to your doctor, of course.
But other than that, they’re not without side effects. A single extra booster late in life shouldn’t really otherwise have any other bad effects, though. But it might not help, either, and your insurance may not cover it - they’re not cheap.
Assuming you’re not immunocompromised, I don’t believe so, other than the typical one-in-a-million chance of an adverse reaction.
Per the infectious-disease specialist from the Mayo Clinic who is quoted in the article: “When in doubt, it doesn’t hurt to just get another dose of a vaccine.”
I believe insurance companies are required to cover recommended vaccines like the MMR vaccine. Especially if you’re following CDC guidance.
If they do balk for some reason, you can get an order from your doctor.
with VA, tetanus is automatic boster
Not really. There are a few specific cases where it is recommended to avoid vaccines in close sequence—when I got the rabies preexposure prophylaxis (because I was scheduled to go to a part of the world in which rabies was considered a real threat) they strongly recommended having some distance between that and other vaccines typically recommended for international travel to developing nations, and there is always a possibility with live attenuated virus of some (generally tiny) potential for adverse reactions because of hyperactivity of a responsive immune system, but in general there is no restriction to getting vaccinations in close sequence, and of course many common vaccines such as MMR or the quadrivalent/trivalent influenza vaccines are combined into a single dose for convenience, because it is more reliable to get people in for one vaccination than to have them come back again and again for a series of them.
If you had no problem getting a measles or MMR vaccine in the past, it is extremely unlikely that absent one of the conditions listed in the link posted above that you’ll have any serious adverse reaction to another, and certainly not because of your prior vaccination. The measles and MMR vaccines are extremely safe for otherwise healthy individuals, and despite RFK Jr and the anti-vax crew trying to present measles as a trivial disease to be beat by taking vitamins and dietary supplements, it can really have some serious reactions and even occasionally kill completely healthy patients in a matter of days regardless of medical support.
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And if you don’t remember being vaccinated in the past, the odds that you’ll have trouble with this vaccine are very small. Ask you doctor, of course, but the MMR vaccine is one of the most studied in the world, and has a very good track record.
I’ve posted about this in another thread, but I made the mistake of getting 5 vaccines in just 6 weeks’ time at a time when I already had mycotoxicosis and a lot of inner inflammation. It sent my blood inflammation markers soaring way past normal-safe levels and I ended up needing a steroid shot and NSAID shot at a clinic to bring it down.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m as pro-vax as anyone on this board. But if you are feeling sickness or have any sort of chronic or inflammatory condition, you should at least space out vaccines by a long time in between, maybe a couple months or more. One shot by itself should be totally fine, like MMR.
For me, it was a combination of 1) already being inflammatory and 2) dumbly crowding too much together in a short span.