 And joining us now to talk about your health is Deborah Jones-Shook, certified registered nurse practitioner at the University of Maryland, St. Joseph Medical Center. Thank you so much for joining us. It is National Immunization Awareness Month. I'm thinking at this point in the pandemic, we're all really aware of immunizations and vaccinations. But what's the importance of this? Well, thank you for having me. It's very important as we kind of have gone through COVID and we've seen surges of RSV. And we had a pretty busy flu season last year. It's very important that we all get our vaccines and immunizations updated so that we can not share our diseases and we can take better care of ourselves and miss less time of work and school that are important to all of us. What's new for this coming flu season, winter season, in terms of maybe vaccine recommendations and what insurance providers, including Medicare, would cover? So there's a couple of new things. And I know a lot of people are very confused. I know in my practice are calling about COVID boosters. So I think the newest kid on the block is RSV vaccine. Just came out, recommended for people who are 60 and older. RSV is a virus that generally in a healthy population affects your cognitive cold symptoms, sinuses, a couple of weeks of just kind of uncomfortableness. For people who are immunocompromised, who have lower respiratory issues, people older than 65, RSV can actually be deadly. It results in hospitalizations. The past year in the United States, RSV took the lives of about 10,000 people over the age of 65. So the RSV vaccine is now just hot off the press, readily available. There's two manufacturers. It's greater than 87% protective. And it's available now at more of the big box pharmacies, Walgreens, CDS. So really anyone 60 and older who's immunocompromised should really get that new vaccine. Definitely will cut back on hospitalizations and mortality overall. There is, we still have the COVID-byvalent that we had before. So if you remember when we all got our first COVID vaccines, we got the monovalent, which was a two series, unless you got the Janssen, which is no longer available in the US. Then the second booster that came out was a bivalent. That was a combination of the original monovalent plus the omicron variant that we all struggled with last year when we had our last surge over the winter. Are we expecting another change of the recipe this time? The recipe is changing. It's actually in the pipeline. It's actually in its second approval phase through the FDA. It should be available in the fall. So we're thinking around November. And that's another monovalent. So that's not going to include any of the old stuff we had. It's going to be a recipe for what's out there now. And that, again, will be recommended for people who are six and older. And there's been some talk about the combination flu in COVID. That's actually in phase two clinical trials. So Novavax is the company that's working on that. I don't anticipate that that would be approved or available really for this season at all. But it's coming. It's in the pipeline. So we'll have to keep our ears open for what's happening. As much as we all want this to just be over, we're seeing the hospitalization numbers for COVID start to inch up. I have friends who managed to go through the whole pandemic and never get the thing until a couple of weeks ago. Are you seeing that in your exam room there? We are. I mean, we're seeing, you know, we're seeing RSC. We're seeing COVID. We haven't seen any flu yet. But I would really, you know, the emergency rooms are already just, they're crippled. You know, you'll talk to people there. People are waiting hours and hours. So it's just really important that people get vaccinated for flu. It takes about two weeks to build the antibodies for immunity for flu. So usually, September is a really good time to get started. If you meet the criteria for RSV, get it done. You don't want to end up sitting in an emergency room. COVID is, you know, we've got plenty of COVID cases. So if you've not had your bivalent, that's an important thing to get updated as well. But we're definitely seeing it rise. You know, we're going to spend some time inside soon. So it's important to make sure that we have good ventilation when we're gathering in groups. We wash our hands. If you have a cold, you sit out on that gathering and, you know, don't share with others. The CDC has a great website on isolation quarantine as well. If people aren't sure when they can kind of go back out if they did get COVID. Yeah, all a good argument for having a primary care provider, increasingly nurse practitioners, and having some sort of annual exam for a couple of reasons. One, you want to take care of this stuff before everybody gets sick, but it's so complicated, you sort of need somebody to tell you what to do. And I have time for just a couple of sentences on this. Yeah, it's really important. I think your primary care provider is going to keep you current on recommendations not only for vaccines, but your screenings, your colon cancer screenings, your mammograms, breast cancer, prostate. They're going to keep your records up to date with your vaccines. Really kind of keep your mental health in check, history, allergies, meds. So it's important you have that relationship. And then when you are sick, you're not going to end up in an urgent care or an emergency room. You're going to call your primary care and they're going to help manage your symptoms. Freed, we have to leave it there. Deborah Jones-Shuk, registered nurse practitioner, University of Maryland St. Joe's Medical Center, thank you so much. Thank you for having me. Your health segments are a co-production of Maryland Public Television and the University of Maryland Medical System.