Adults should undergo pneumonia vaccination
In line with last week’s celebration of World Pneumonia Day, health experts are urging adults to have themselves vaccinated against pneumonia, especially smokers and those with existing conditions like diabetes, saying that they are at high risk of developing the fatal respiratory disease.
Vaccination essential management strategy
Rontgene Solante, chairman of San Lazaro Hospital’s adult infectious diseases and tropical medicine section, said vaccination is an “essential management strategy in high-risk medical conditions” like chronic respiratory diseases, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes and for smokers.
Solante said adults with chronic respiratory ailments are five times to 17 times more likely to develop Invasive Pneumoccocal Disease (IPD) - or simply pneumonia – than healthy adults.
Those with cardiovascular diseases and diabetes, on the other hand, are three to 10 times and two times to six times, respectively, more at risk.
Smoking top risk factor
“Cigarette smoking is the strongest independent risk factor for pneumonia in immunocompromised adults aged 18 to 64 years,” Solante told a press briefing.
The number of people with pneumonia continue to rise primarily because of lack of awareness about the existence of vaccine, even among health professionals.
“You (doctors) have to relay that to your patients. That is very important and I think there is a gap in terms of information. The doctors, maybe, are not aware of prevention,” Solante said.
Solante also attributed this lapse to “time constraints” as many doctors are not able to spend enough time with their patients.
The other barriers to pneumoccocal vaccination in adults is the lack of “well” visits to doctors by adults who are mostly used to seek consultation when they are not well and the “lack of strong endorsement or recommendation by health professionals.”
“Probably, their awareness is very low in terms of using the vaccines for prevention. That’s why it is our advocacy in the infectious disease society. We go around and we distribute the guidelines so that they will be able to utilize that with their groups of patients,” Solante added.
2 vaccines for adults
Solante said it is important for adults to be given anti- pneumonia vaccines before they reach 50, especially if they have “co-morbidities.”
Two vaccines must be administered to an adult to complete their protection. These are the pneumoccocal conjugate vaccine ( PCV 13) and pneumoccocal polysaccharides vaccine 23 ( PPV 23).
“We don’t call it booster. We have what you call ‘sequential’ vaccination schedule. The term there is is sequential. You have to give first the PCV13 and then follow it up ith PPC 23,” he maintained.
Based on the guidelines, if the PCV 13 is given first, the PPV23 must be administered after two months but if the PPV23 is given fi rst, it must be followed up by PCV13 after one year.
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