Fall starts officially on Sunday, and that means little signs of the new season are all about. The air has a crisp hint of coolness in the morning, the foliage will start changing colors, and many people think of the annual vaccines they should get right around now. What shots should you be concerned about getting, and why? Dr. Gregory Poland is the head of the vaccine research group at the Mayo Clinic; he appeared on 710 WOR’s Len Berman and Michael Riedel in the Morning program to lay out “the big three” of vaccinations.
“This is the start of respiratory virus season, and there’s a number of vaccines we can take to protect ourselves,” Dr. Poland told Berman and Riedel. “We all know about covid, and there are three different vaccine types that one could get… a flu vaccine- and everybody over the age of six months should get a flu vaccine every year- RSV vaccine, if you’re 75 and older or 50-74 and have risk factors, and then, sort of after those big three, [there are] things you should catch up on, like shingles, pneumococcal vaccine and tetanus-diphtheria-acellular pertussis.”
Dr. Poland also addressed a Chinese study that suggests that the caffeine in three cups of coffee won’t hurt you. “In general, having one, two, even up to three cups of coffee per day does seem to offer health benefits. Now, somebody who has heart arrhythmias (or) irregularities, caffeine can, in some of those individuals, make that worse, and that’s a proviso, and the caffeine that’s in soft drinks and sugary drinks may not be the same, but coffee and green tea, black tea, (are) generally good.”
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