Pregnant Women May Get Priority In Swine Flu Vaccinations
Pregnant women may be among the first to receive new swine flu vaccines due to data showing that they are among the most likely to be hit by the illness.
Officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will hear from a panel of experts on Wednesday who will advise the agency of what groups should be prioritized to receive vaccinations for the H1N1 virus when it becomes available in October.
The US plans to have about 160 million doses of swine flu vaccine on hand this fall. Testing on the vaccines is set to begin soon.
"The panel will get an update on the H1N1 in the United States," said CDC spokesman Tom Skinner. "They will get an update on where things stand with the development of a vaccine against novel H1N1 and an update on the steps being taken to plan for a potential vaccination campaign in the fall."
"We won’t have final guidelines for use of the vaccine, [but] we will have a pretty good idea of who is going to be first in line to get a vaccine if we get to the point of having a vaccine that is safe and effective by late fall or early winter," he said.
Health care workers are expected to be at the top of the priority list, which falls in line with normal procedures to guard against a possible pandemic.
But the CDC says pregnant women have accounted for 6 percent of swine flu deaths in the US since April. However, pregnant women only account for 1 percent of the overall US population.
"Are they more at risk for severe disease? That’s the issue," Dr. Denise Jamieson, an epidemiologist with the CDC, told the Associated Press.
A recent report from the World Health Organization (WHO) showed that pregnant women could be "at increased risk for severe disease, potentially resulting in spontaneous abortion and/or death, especially during the second and third trimesters of pregnancy."
But WHO has not yet issued a formal recommendation for pregnant women to be prioritized for vaccines.
The CDC has shown that 302 American deaths have been linked to swine flu so far. The CDC has detailed information on 266 of those deaths, and 15 of them, or 6 percent, were pregnant women.
Last week, the CDC estimated that up to 40 percent of Americans could be infected with the swine flu virus over the next two years.
The infection rate estimates show that the number of people infected by swine flu would double the number of people with normal seasonal flu.
Data implies that while about 36,000 people die from flu during a normal season, that figure could grow from 90,000 to more than a hundred thousand.
With the development and release of the vaccine, the infection rate would be likely to fall.
In June, the WHO announced that a global pandemic of the H1N1 virus was underway. As a result, it raised the global pandemic alert level to Phase 6, due to the spread of the virus, not the rate of morbidity, said the CDC.
The swine flu is estimated to have infected more than 1 million people in the US, with more than 302 deaths and 44,000 reported cases, according to the CDC. Many cases are likely to go unreported because they only cause mild symptoms.
"The spread of this virus continues, if you see 160 out of 193 WHO member states now have cases, so we are nearing almost 100 percent but not quite yet," WHO spokesman Gregory Hartl said last week.
"We don’t know how the virus will change going forward," he said.
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