Protection from the TdaP vaccine doesn’t last very long

Follow me at @drClaire When my patients come in for their 11-year check-up, I give them the TdaP vaccine. I explain to them that a big part of the reason we give it is to protect them against pertussis, or whooping cough. I talk about outbreaks that are happening all the time, how it can be especially dangerous for little babies, and how this vaccine can help stop them from catching pertussis and spreading it to others. It turns out that’s only true for about 2 to 3 years after getting the vaccine, according to a study just published in the journal Pediatrics. Before the early 1990s, we used a different kind of pertussis vaccine, a “whole-cell” vaccine. It worked quite well, and rates of pertussis were quite low among vaccinated people. But the vaccine had side effects. Fever, swelling, and pain at the injection site, as well as sleepiness or irritability, were common. Rarely, it led to seizures or similar episodes, and even more rarely it caused acute encephalopathy, a more serious but temporary effect on the brain. Because of all this, we changed the vaccine to the “acellular” kind, which has fewer side effects. We went from DTP to DTaP. And when we did, we stopped protecting children as well as before. Recent studies show that protection against pertussis goes down 42% each year after the fifth vaccine dose, which is given at 4-6 years. This means that by the time kids get to be 10 or 11, they have hardly any protection at all. In 2010, when the first group of ki...
Source: New Harvard Health Information - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Children's Health Parenting Prevention Vaccines Source Type: news