This article was posted by Yahoo News. Read more here.
Delaying the hepatitis B vaccine in babies will lead to a “substantial” increase in infections — and longer delays will lead to deaths, new research says.
“Even brief delays in HepB vaccine initiation were associated with a substantial increase in HBV infections, adverse health outcomes, and health care costs,” according to a study in JAMA Pediatrics.
Hepatitis B (or HBV) is a serious liver infection that can be short-lived, or chronic — meaning it lasts longer than six months. At that stage, the disease raises the risk of liver failure, liver cancer and cirrhosis. It spreads through bodily fluids — and while President Donald Trump dismissed it as a “sexually transmitted” disease, it can also be transmitted from mom to bany during childbirth, the Mayo Clinic noted. According to the CDC’s own data, 90% of infants infected with hepatitis go on to develop a chronic infection.
For the study, researchers used data on 3,628,934 infants, and found that delaying the shot by 2 months for infants whose parents did not test positive for hepatitis B still can lead to 90 acute infections, 76 chronic infections, 29 deaths, and cost $16.4 million. Delaying the shot for 12 months may cause 190 acute infections, 50 deaths, and carry an additional cost of nearly $30 million, the research says.
About half of children with the disease were infected during birth, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia said, while others caught it from family members. The virus is highly concentrated: “Amounts of blood too small to be seen can contain enough viral particles to cause infection. In addition, many people don’t know that they are infected,” CHOP says.
Since routine vaccination began in 1991, the disease was “virtually eliminated” in children under 19, per CHOP.
But the decision to stop universally administering the vaccine at birth was made in December, at the recommendation of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). It’s a committee that was recently repopulated with candidates hand-picked by longtime vaccine skeptic, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., after he dismissed all 17 previous members of the committee.
The study’s co-author, Eric Hall, told The Washington Post that researchers shared a preliminary version of their research ahead of the CDC’s decision in December. “We noticed that the committee did not have the evidence they needed to inform their decision,” Hall, assistant professor of epidemiology at Oregon Health and Science University, told the outlet. “But this group kind of blew past all that and didn’t make any effort to fill the evidence gaps that they might have had. They just went ahead anyway.”