14 DAY TRIAL // Vaccinating pregnant women against the influenza virus proved to be over ninety percent effective in preventing their newborn children from being hospitalized with the flu, during their first six months of life, concluded Yale School of Medicine researchers, after a three-year study.
The research was led by first author Isaac Benowitz, a Yale medical student, senior author Marietta Vazquez, MD, and their colleagues, and they wanted to see whether flu vaccine during pregnancy was effective in preventing hospitalization in infants.
So what they did, was enroll infants with influenza, hospitalized at the Yale-New Haven Hospital and a similar group of infants without the virus, before comparing whether their mothers had gotten the flu vaccine during pregnancy or not.
Vazquez, who is also an assistant professor in the Department of Pediatrics at Yale, said that “when we compared vaccination rates during pregnancy in the study, we found that in the group of infants who didn’t have influenza, far more mothers received the influenza vaccine.
“In the group of infants studied, giving the vaccine to a woman during pregnancy was 91.5 percent effective in preventing hospitalization due to influenza.”
The researcher explained that since there is no vaccine available for infants under six months old, their findings are very important as they come up with an effective strategy for protecting these newborns.
Besides, since one vaccine protects two individuals, the vaccination during pregnancy is also cost-effective.
Influenza is quite a problem, especially for pregnant women and their babies, since it can cause serious respiratory disease in mothers and can lead their infants to the hospital.
As previously said, there is no approved vaccination for infants under the age of six months, even if doctors recommend the flu vaccine for all pregnant women and children.
Also, people who come in contact with newborns should think of adopting preventive strategies.
The two authors worked with Daina B. Esposito, Kristina D. Gracey and Eugene D. Shapiro, MD.
This study is based on the preliminary data that the team of researchers presented last year, at the Infectious Disease Society of America in Philadelphia, and it was published in the December 15 issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases.