Pregnant women should be vaccinated against pertussis from the second trimester of pregnancyso that their newborn is protected from birththe French health authorities estimated on Tuesday, thus joining the recommendations of many other countries.
“The High Authority for Health (HAS) recommends vaccinating pregnant women against whooping cough in order to protect the newborn in whom this disease is particularly dangerous”the body said in a statement.
“This vaccination must be carried out from the second trimester of each pregnancy”she says.
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A thousand children hospitalized since 2013
Caused by a bacterium, whooping cough is a particularly contagious disease that results in severe bouts of coughing for several weeks. In the majority of patients, it is not serious but can cause sometimes fatal complications in the little ones.
Since 2013, a thousand children under the age of one have thus gone to hospital in France because of whooping cough and a few deaths are recorded each year, even if their number is disproportionate to those recorded in the countries developing, where vaccination is less frequent.
Until then, the French health authorities only recommended direct vaccination of toddlers and not pregnant women.
However, many other countries, including the United Kingdom and the United States, encourage such vaccination at the end of pregnancy, with the idea of giving the child protection from birth.
Favorable UK data
“The data published in pregnant women exposed to the whooping cough vaccine during pregnancy are very numerous and reassuring, and relate in particular to the 2nd and 3rd trimester”notes in particular on its site the Reference Center on Teratogenic Agents (CRAT), an organization which monitors the risks for the fetus of drugs taken during pregnancy.
The High Authority for Health therefore aligns itself with these recommendations, noting that the British data testify to the effectiveness of such vaccination in avoiding hospitalizations in infants.
The authority had already made an exception since 2018 for the territory of Mayotte, where it recommended vaccination for pregnant women in order to curb a local epidemic of whooping cough.
It is therefore now extending this recommendation to the whole of France, further deeming it necessary to repeat the vaccination with each pregnancy because of the limited duration of effectiveness of pertussis vaccines.
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