New research reveals that vaccinating pregnant women helped protect their newborns from the common but fearsome respiratory syncytial virusknown as RSVwhich every fall fills baby hospitals.
The preliminary results offer hope that, after decades of failure and frustration, RSV vaccines could finally be close.
Pfizer announced Tuesday that a large international study found that vaccinating expectant mothers was nearly 82% effective in the prevention of csevere cases of RSV in the first 90 days of their babies’ lives, when they are most vulnerable.
At 6 months of age, the vaccine was still 69% effective against serious illness, and there were no indications of safety concerns for mothers or babies.
“Mothers are always passing their antibodies to their babysaid virologist Kena Swanson, Pfizer’s vice president of viral vaccines. “The vaccine just puts them in a much better position” to form and transmit the antibodies that fight RSV.
The search for the vaccine is not only to protect newborns. RSV is also dangerous among older adultsand both Pfizer and its rival GSK recently announced that their competing vaccines were also shown to protect the elderly.
None of these findings will help this year, when an early wave of RSV is already overwhelming children’s hospitals. But they raise the possibility that one or more vaccines will be available before RSV season next fall.
“My fingers are crossed,” said Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist at Vanderbilt University. “We are making progress”.
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Tuesday’s data was released in a press release and has not been reviewed by independent experts.
WHAT IS RSV?
For most healthy people, the RSV is a nuisance similar to a cold.
But for the very young, the elderly, and people with certain health conditions, can be serious, and even fatal. The virus can infect deep within the lungs, causing pneumonia, and in babies it can impede breathing by inflaming their tiny airways.
In the United States, about 58,000 children under the age of 5 are hospitalized for RSV each year, and several hundred die. Among adults older than 65, some 177,000 are hospitalized for RSV and 14,000 die annually.
Globally, RSV kills about 100,000 children a year.especially in poor countries.
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