- Burnett School College of Medicine Faculty News
With back-to-school immunizations already underway, the question of vaccine safety was a key topic at June 17’s UCF Med Talk, a series of discussions that brings College of Medicine science to university alumni and friends at Orlando’s Downtown PourHouse.
This session’s speaker was Dr. Griffith Parks, director of the Burnett School of Biomedical Sciences and an expert on how viruses work, infect the body and how to stop them from spreading.
“Over the past two decade more than 322 million illnesses have been prevented because of vaccines,” Dr. Parks said, adding that diseases like polio and small pox have for the most part been eradicated because of the effectiveness of vaccines. He told the audience that vaccines are safe but that different people can react to them in different ways. He added that the health risks are small compared to getting the diseases the vaccines are trying to prevent.
The MedTalk series is sponsored by FAIRWINDS Credit Union. The next UCF Med Talk is scheduled for the fall. Details will be available soon. All UCF alumni and the UCF community are invited.