Vaccine waning?
October 8, 2012
A CASE controlled study
published in the New England
Journal of Medicine has found that
the acellular pertussis vaccine may
not offer long-lasting whooping
cough protection.
The study looked at children who
received the fifth dose of the
diphtheria-tetanus-acellular
pertussis vaccine from 2006 to
2011, to assess their risk of
whooping cough.
Researchers compared 277
children, four to 12 years of age,
who were PCR-positive for
pertussis with 3,318 PCR-negative
controls and 6,086 matched controls.
According to their findings PCRpositive
children were more likely
to have received the fifth DTaP
dose earlier than PCR-negative
controls (P controls (P=0.005).
In addition, comparison with PCRnegative
controls yielded an odds
ratio of 1.42 (95% confidence
interval, 1.21 to 1.66), indicating
that after the fifth dose of DTaP, the
odds of acquiring pertussis
increased by an average of 42% per
year.
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