Hidden good news

The childhood pneumonia vaccine has been out there for ten years and it seems has made no significant impact. In fact between 1994 and 2007 rates of childhood pneumonia were constant.

In fact they increased. In 1994, 19 in 1000 children were diagnosed. In 2007 22 out of a 1000 got the lung infection diagnosis.

But wait, these numbers might be misleading. Numbers of children treated for pneumonia has gone done since PCV7 or Pfizer’s Prevnar. “It’s possible that the vaccination has had a major impact on the more serious complications of pneumonia,” said Dr. Samir S. Shah of the University of Pensylvania School of Medicine in Philadelphia, research lead.

Prevnar protects against pneumonia, meningitis and middle ear infections by blocking Streptococcus pneumoniae or pneumococcus. “If you look at how effective the vaccine was in reducing meningitis and blood infections, it has done a phenomenal job,” said Shah. “What is not available in this study is what is causing the pneumonia that is being captured in these databases,” said Kim Center of Pfizer. Pneumonia can be caused microbes other than pneumococcus, including viruses.

More than a million Americans end up in the hospital with pneumonia each year. In the last year of this study, 2007, 52,000 people died. Electing to receive the vaccination is one way to reduce exposure to antibiotics which are used to treat the disease. “The problem is that if you prescribe a lot of these antibiotics you end up seeing higher rates of drug resistance in the community. If you can shift prescribing away from broad-spectrum antibiotics to narrow antibiotics, that may improve public health,” said Shah.

Source: Reuters