מתוך medicontext.co.il
WESTPORT, CT (Reuters Health) – The 7-valent pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (PNCV7) greatly reduces the disease burden due to Streptococcus pneumoniae in children younger than 5, according to a presentation at the 39th Annual Meeting of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, being held in San Francisco.
According to Dr. Steven Black, of Kaiser Permanente in Oakland, California, the serotypes represented in PNCV7 account for more than 85% of pneumococcal disease in children and more than 90% of strains resistant to penicillin.
Some 82,000 children below age 5 received at least one immunization between 1995 and 2001. "Even though only 34% [of enrollees that age] had received just one dose of the vaccine, and 13.6% were fully vaccinated, there was a 62% reduction in disease risk for all children in this age group," Dr. Black told Reuters Health. These results suggest a high level of herd immunity, he said.
For example, the incidence of pneumococcal disease due to the vaccine serotypes among 1-year-old children fell from 98.2 per 100,000 in 1998 to 9.4 per 100/000 in 2001. "When you introduce a new vaccine, you can't vaccinate everybody all at once," Dr. Black noted, "but as this is rolled out, we will see the disease disappear even more quickly when we vaccinate the kids."
In addition to reducing disease burden in youngsters, Dr. Black expects to see a decreased risk of pneumococcal sepsis and pneumonia in elderly adults. "One of the risk factors for carrying that organism is exposure to a young child," he said, adding that "carriage rates of S. pneumonia are 20% among those 60 and under who live with a young child versus 5% among those who don't."
"Therefore, by vaccinating these young children, we expect we will see a reduced risk of disease in the adults, even though they're not being vaccinated," he concluded.
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