What's the Big Deal?

Arkansas is considering building a vaccine registry for adults so that doctors can quickly check if a resident has had a specific shot. From the Arkansas Democrat Gazette:

[Dr. James Phillips, branch chief of infectious disease for the state Health Department] pointed to the Feb. 24, 2007, tornado in Dumas, where dozens of buildings were destroyed and more than 25 people were injured. As state health officials made the rounds offering tetanus shots to the storm victims, they encountered a problem.

"When asked about when did you have your last tetanus booster, virtually no one knew when that was," Phillips said. "... If we had an adult registry, then we could answer these questions quite rapidly."

The registry would provide information like that on an individual level but also help determine health department actions on a larger scale.

This would be the state's second attempt to create the database. The first was stopped in 2007 because of fears the data would be compromised and some viewed it as an intrusion into their private lives.

Not sure where those arguments were back in 1985 when Arkansas built a similar database for children. That registry, which has 2.9 million records, is used "all the time," the Gazette reported, and has helped the state contain such diseases as whooping cough. Pretty sure this passes the benefits/cost test.