Chickenpox jab for all children and pregnant women
Chickenpox jab for all children and pregnant women
By Fiona Macrae
The government is considering combining the chickenpox jab with the MMR triple vaccine
Children and pregnant women could be routinely vaccinated against chickenpox.
Options being considered by government advisers include combining the jab with the MMR triple vaccine, creating a four-in-one shot.
The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation is also considering vaccinating adults against shingles, which is caused by the same virus.
Recommendations made by the expert panel of doctors, nurses and scientists are almost always turned into health policy.
Child health specialists say mass vaccination is the best defence against chickenpox, which claims to up to 50 lives a year, 40 of them children.
But critics fear the vaccination will overload the immune systems of infants, who are already given 25 vaccines in ten shots by the age of 13 months.
There are around 300,000 cases of chickenpox a year in the UK. Most people make a full recovery but several hundred will suffer complications such as pneumonia, blood poisoning and infection by flesh-eating bacteria.
Adults, very young babies and pregnant women are at particular risk of complications, with babies exposed to chickenpox in the womb at risk of brain damage or blindness.
Children are already routinely vaccinated against chickenpox in the U.S., Australia and Germany, and Irish guidelines advise that pregnant women be given the jab if they are not immune.
A chickenpox sub-group of the JCVI will meet to discuss the issue in March. The vaccine costs around £30 a shot, so the cost effectiveness will be considered, as will the drug’s safety.
Official papers show the JCVI is also considering vaccinating pregnant women who are not immune to the disease.
Professor Adam Finn, a expert on child health and vaccination, said: ‘In 999 cases out of 1,000, chickenpox is a trivial illness but that’s not the point.
‘What we can’t do is predict the children who are going to die from it or get quite seriously ill and end up in hospital.
‘If you want to prevent the deaths, the only way to do that is to immunise everybody.’
Professor Finn, a paediatrician at Bristol University’s medical school, predicted that mass immunisation could be introduced within five years.
There are concerns that vaccinating children could lead to a surge of shingles among adults. Shingles, which causes ongoing pain, develops when a chickenpox germ which has lain in the body for many years reactivates.
Cases of chickenpox among children are thought to boost adults’ immune systems and prevent shingles from developing.
Vaccinating against shingles could sidestep the problem.
But London GP Richard Halvorsen, author of The Truth About Vaccines, said: ‘Shingles is much more of a health issue than chickenpox. So we are potentially making a very small problem a little bit less and making a big problem that much bigger.’
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