There are no flu vaccines for children under six months old, but a new three year study by Yale University researchers seems to indicate that giving the flu vaccine to pregnant woman is ninety percent effective in protecting newborns up to six months.
Flu is a major cause of hospitalization for newborns, but until this research was released, there wasn’t much doctors could recommend other than isolating newborns from potential sources of infection. Now it appears that there is a more proactive solution.
“When we compared vaccination rates during pregnancy in the study, we found that in the group of infants who didn’t have influenza, far more mothers received the influenza vaccine,” says Marietta Vazquez, an assistant professor in the department of pediatrics at Yale and the senior author of the study in a press release. “In the group of infants studied, giving the vaccine to a woman during pregnancy was 91.5 percent effective in preventing hospitalization due to influenza.”
The study enrolled infants hospitalized at Yale-New Haven Hospital with flu related issues and a similar group of infants without influenza. The research team then compared whether each infant’s mother had gotten the flu vaccine during pregnancy. The flu shot seemed to be overwhelmingly effective in protecting both mother and child.
