• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

Pneumonia Vaccine Cuts Hospital Stays

Posted on: Thursday, 5 April 2007, 18:00 CDT

Routinely immunizing infants with pneumococcal conjugate vaccine has cut U.S. pneumonia hospital admissions for kids under age 2 by 39 percent.

What's more, researchers at Vanderbilt University who did the study said the kids' vaccine program seems to have had a similar impact on adult hospital admissions for the disease.

They attributed the drop in adult pneumonia to the herd immunity effect in which unvaccinated older people benefit from the vaccination of children and infants, adding that the vaccine might show benefits in other areas of the world.

The introduction of the vaccine could have a large effect in less developed countries, said researcher Carlos Grijalva, where pneumococcal diseases cause not only substantial morbidity and health care costs, but also high childhood mortality.

The team did a comparative analysis of the data on pneumonia hospital admissions for children aged 2 years and younger from 1997 to 1999 and 2001 to 2004 from the Nationwide Inpatient Sample from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

They saw a 39-percent drop in pneumonia admissions for this age group, representing around 41,000 admissions in 2004, and an annual decline of nearly 25,000 hospital admissions in adults ages 18 to 39 in the post-vaccination years.

The vaccine was introduced in the United States in 2000.

The study is published in this week's edition of The Lancet.

Source: United Press International

More News in this Category