Podcast: Vaccines for preventing rotavirus diarrhoea: vaccines in use

Rotavirus infection is a common cause of diarrhoea and a variety of vaccines are used to try to prevent it. The evidence for these is examined in the fourth update of a Cochrane Review, published in March 2019 and we asked Hanna Bergman one of the authors based in the Cochrane Response team in London UK to tell us about the problem and the latest findings." Rotavirus infection is common across the world and although some babies and young children might not develop any symptoms, others might get so ill that they need to go into hospital and some may die. Most of the deaths associated with rotavirus occur in children in low- and middle-income countries, particularly sub-Saharan Africa and the Indian subcontinent. Before children started being vaccinated, rotavirus infection caused almost half a million deaths per year in children under five.Since 2009, the World Health Organization has recommended that a rotavirus vaccine be included in all national infant and child immunization programmes, and almost 100 countries currently do so. Therefore, we have updated this review in order to examine the latest evidence on both the benefits and the potential side effects of the rotavirus vaccines that have been prequalified by the WHO for preventing diarrhea and deaths in infants and young children. We also looked at whether the effects differ when the vaccines are used in countries with high or low mortality rates.We included 55 randomized trials in more than 200,000 infants and young ch...
Source: Cochrane News and Events - Category: Information Technology Authors: Source Type: news