Advance

macarena munoz He is a pediatrician and directs the Virgen de África Primary Care Center in Seville. She and her team, like the rest of the Sevillian health centers, had to face an outbreak of bronchiolitis last November that saturated hospital emergency rooms and caused panic in some families with infected babies or young children. If everything goes as planned, this situation will not repeat itself this winter.

-What will this first vaccination campaign mean for Sevillian health centers?

-Against RSV there was only one vaccine for hospital use that had to be given every month and that had many limitations. Now we are going to have a single-dose vaccine for ambulatory use for the first time, which can be given to all newborns and which is more effective than the one given in the hospital. We are going to actively recruit this campaign through the health centers and those born after October 1, 2023 will be vaccinated at the hospital. The campaign will last until May and will represent a major advance compared to last year, when we had a hard time in all health centers and hospital emergencies due to bronchiolitis infection. The campaign starts before the infection starts and this is going to be super positive.

Will it prevent outbreaks like the ones that collapsed some emergency services last November from repeating themselves?

-Yeah. I believe that the effect will be similar to the one that the inclusion of flu vaccination in the population group from 6 months to 5 years of age had last year. The incidence of flu dropped a lot and the cases that came to us had much fewer complications. We expect the same thing to happen this coming winter with bronchiolitis.

-One of the problems was the lack of medicines for those ages.

-Indeed, we have a very limited therapeutic arsenal for infants under 6 months of age, who were the ones who came to us with the most complications due to bronchiolitis infection. We hope that attendance due to respiratory pathologies will drop, both flu and respiratory syncytial virus. If these types of infections reach health centers, we hope they will be much milder than last winter and there will be no hospital admissions. The prospects are much better than last year, although we will see it as the campaign progresses, since it is the first time it has been done and you always have to be prudent. We are very optimistic.

-Several laboratories are working on RSV vaccines for pregnant women and those over 60 years of age.

-I do not know the details of these vaccines, but it seems logical to me that this is the case because children and the elderly are the most vulnerable groups. Regarding pregnant women, it would be a great advance, perhaps like the one achieved with whooping cough when it was included in pregnant women. It was first done in the US and it was observed that these children were already born protected against this pathology and its incidence in infants and children was drastically reduced.

-How is the situation right now of the health centers in Seville?

-I’ll talk about mine because I don’t know exactly if it could be extrapolated to other centers. Right now there is little infectious disease and the demand for care due to vacations has fallen a lot. We have kept telephone appointments because many of our users are outside of Seville and the demand is mainly for prescriptions. On the other hand, the structural workforce of our center is covered one hundred percent because we have had many retirements due to the high average age of our staff. Thus, the holidays have not significantly altered the coverage of paediatricians, family doctors and nurses.

-Can you make an appointment from one day to the next?

-Yeah. Even on the same day we can offer a face-to-face consultation at this time.

2023-08-12 05:23:00
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