Today, we can easily track our emails and banking transactions. Registries, under development throughout the country, allow us to easily track children's immunizations. Creating a system to use them properly is as important as developing vaccines in the first place. Another renowned immunologist who is Director of the National Immunization Program at CDC and Assistant Surgeon General of the Public Health Service, Walter Orenstein, MD, MPH, spoke of the benefits of registries, both from a public health and a physician s standpoint. Gregory Gilmet, MD, MPH, pediatrician and now Medical Director of Medica Health Plans of Minnesota, cited an ancient Greek speaking to Prometheus, it is but sorrow to be wise when wisdom profits not.
Families are increasingly mobile and lack information about immunizations.
Today's young parents have never witnessed the effects of epidemics of contagious childhood diseases and therefore become lax about the need for immunizations. Margaret McChesney, RN is a community health nurse in Phoenix, Arizona whose car is her traveling office. Most of the families she and the other providers under her treat are hard to reach. They are rural or urban poor and migrant farm workers. McChesney marvels at how registries have improved her practice in so many ways.