Urgent Care News

In a flu season that has been classified as the worst in decades, influenza vaccinations prevented anywhere from 40,000 to 90,000 hospitalizations according to data just released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The effectiveness data are less straightforward; the 2018–2019 vaccine was 29% effective overall. That figure is deceptively low, however, in that the CDC says this year’s vaccine offered “no significant protection” against H3N2 influenza, but lowered the risk of H1N1 …

It’s an inescapable, irrefutable fact that too many clinicians are writing too many prescriptions for unwarranted antibiotics in the United States. We all know the consequences, too; around 23,000 Americans die every year from drug-resistant infections, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Urgent care certainly is not immune to the misguided practice, but as an industry we’re taking strong steps to reverse the trend. The most recent development: The Urgent Care Association, …

The key to safer, appropriate use of antibiotics may lie in something as simple as better education for both physicians and patients, according to a new study published in Academic Emergency Medicine. Funded by a contract with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, researchers at UC Davis saw inappropriate prescriptions for antibiotics fall by one third in nine emergency departments and urgent care centers in California and Colorado after introducing one of two educational …

The World Health Organization just released data indicating that more than a million new sexually transmitted infections occur in individuals 15 to 49 years of age every day worldwide. The domestic situation is no better, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says there are “steep and sustained increases in sexually transmitted diseases” in the U.S. The relative anonymity of urgent care, where patients are less likely to have an ongoing medical relationship with …

The winter of 2018–2019 was full of headlines tracking the worst flu season in decades. Then, the resurgence of measles—thought to be “eliminated” in the United States in 2000—took the spotlight. More quietly, and even more insidiously than measles, hepatitis A cases have been mounting across the country. In Ohio alone, 2,997 cases were confirmed over the past year. Since 2016, there have been 20,133 in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control …

Prevailing wisdom is that the current outbreak of measles in the United States began when travelers returned from visiting a country where immunization is not the norm to a community where compliance rates are low. It hasn’t taken long for over a thousand people to be diagnosed, and it’s likely the spread isn’t over. The series of events essentially exposed a loophole in the idea that herd immunity is “enough.” Now that Americans are starting …