Hep B vaccine

[KPInvestor]

Correct me if I am wrong but Hep B is transmitted through sexual contact, blood or mom to baby.  If this is the case what is the point of giving this vaccine to newborns?   I would think Hep A would be more of a risk.  Someone please enlighten me.

[Dicast]

Early infection with hep B is much more dangerous for children and they die at a much higher rate. Carrier adults may not know they have hep B. It can spread on toothbrushes which people would not necessarily worry about.

http://www.immunize.org/catg.d/p4110.pdf

[tex]

1000 new perinatal cases a year, 90% of those develop chronic hep b infection, and untreated 25% will die of HCC or cirrhosis. Give my kid hep A any day of the week.

Might not seem like big numbers until you realize appropriate post exposure prophylaxis (Straightforward and in the standing order set in every hospital in the country) reduces infection rate to less than 1%. A sizeable chunk of the incidence is just straight up medical error. If you decide to defer you might want to ask the lab to run it twice...

[Miss Bonnie MD]

So when they started vaccinating older children/teens only (after targeting high risk peeps first), the Hep B incidence didn't decrease. It did once they started vaccinating newborns.

[Miss Bonnie MD]

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1835756

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3092064

[VagabondMD]

Lifetime immunity and increasing herd immunity to a deadly disease does not seem like a bad deal.

[Peds]

This is the same rhetoric the antivaxers use in my clinic.

Tex is correct as well as Miss Bonnie.

It was our first anticancer vaccine.

HPV is the second.

 

[Peds]

KPInvestor wrote:

Correct me if I am wrong but Hep B is transmitted through sexual contact, blood or mom to baby.  If this is the case what is the point of giving this vaccine to newborns?   I would think Hep A would be more of a risk.  Someone please enlighten me.

Click to expand...

Hepatitis A is transmitted via fecal-oral. You need to be 1 year old to receive it. All infections are risks to infants, but only some can be protected against.

[Tuxedo]

The initial strategy with the HepB vaccine was to vaccinate only high risk individuals.  Didn't work.  So now we vaccinate everyone.  Maybe we were not good at figuring out who is high risk?  The HepB vaccine at birth is likely not a big deal either way as children who otherwise follow the schedule end up completing the series by 6 months even if they don't get it at birth.