Whole communities in Africa could be protected from pneumococcus by immunising young children

Press release from PLoS Medicine

2011-10-19

(Press-News.org) Whole communities in Africa could be protected from pneumococcus by immunising young children

A study led by the Medical Research Council in The Gambia in collaboration with the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and published in this week's PLoS Medicine shows for the first time in Africa, that vaccinating young children against the pneumococcus (a bacterium that can cause fatal infections) causes a herd effect in which the entire community is protected against this infection.

In a randomised, controlled trial involving 21 villages in rural Gambia, the authors showed that vaccination of young children reduced carriage of vaccine serotype pneumococci (the type of pneumoccus contained in the vaccine) not only in the vaccinated children but also in vaccinated and non-vaccinated older children and adults. Furthermore, the study showed that vaccinating whole communities did not result in a community wide increase in carriage of nonvaccine serotype pneumococci (other types of pneumococci that are not included in the vaccine) in the two-year period after vaccination.

As an alternative method to long-term observational studies and to anticipate the potential long term effects of the introduction of pneumococcal conjugate vaccination in sub-Saharan Africa, the authors conducted a village-randomized trial in The Gambia in which the whole population of some villages were immunized with pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (PCV-7) (vaccinated villages) and in other villages only children END

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Whole communities in Africa could be protected from pneumococcus by immunising young children

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