Alaskans In Need Of Better Vaccines

Written by OJ Fagbire

Wednesday, 25 April 2007

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In 2001, both native and non-native Alaskan kids were given the PCV7 vaccine to protect them against pneumococcus. Directly following the vaccination, there was a 67 percent decrease in infection in native children under age 2, and a 61 percent in non-native children through 2003.

Unfortunately, despite the immediate success of the PCV7 vaccine, new strains of pneumococcus are developing quickly, and re-infecting the children, which means that all of the progress that had been made up until 2003 was essentially eliminated by the reinfection that occurred through 2006.

This new trend of infection really emphasizes the need for vaccines that are not serotype specific. A serotype specific vaccine is only good for preventing one strand of disease, which means that as the disease mutates and changes, the vaccines become less effective. Hence, Researcher Rosalyn Singleton and her colleagues with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are pushing for continued surveillance of patients who have received these vaccines as well as monitoring of the effects of the vaccines.

This study, published in the April 25 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, focuses on the occurrence of IPD in Alaskan children between 1995 and 2006. Using laboratory findings on infections including Streptococcus pneumoniae infections such as: pneumonia, meningitis, and bateremia, or blood poisoning, they are better able to understand what needs to be done to avoid another outbreak, and how to control for the already mutated strains of the old pneumococcus infection. In the mean time, constant surveillance is being done to avoid an epidemic.

“There now exists a substantially elevated risk for IPD from serotypes not contained in PCV7,” the authors state in their study. Hopefully there will be new developments in the near future to create extended valency vaccines and generalized vaccines which are not serotype-specific.

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