Advice comes from decades of experience with flu transmission
The optimal way to control swine flu, the new H1N1 virus that emerged as a global threat in 2009, is to vaccinate children with the planned H1N1 flu vaccine, says the co-director of the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Division of Pediatric Infectious Diseases.
"Children are the highest-risk group for spreading the virus among themselves, and as a consequence, spreading it around their community," says UAB's David Kimberlin, M.D., one of four U.S. physicians serving on the federal Safety Monitoring Committee reviewing clinical trials of H1N1 vaccines. The committee is a part of the Division of Microbiology and Infectious Diseases at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
"Like a bull's-eye, the middle of the target is what you vaccinate so you don't see infections in the concentric rings around the center," Kimberlin says. "The center of the protection bull's-eye should be children."
The United States' prospects for distributing a safe and effective vaccine to prevent infection with the current H1N1 virus are excellent, Kimberlin says.
"The National Institutes of Health are conducting a number of studies across the country at special vaccine evaluation sites they've had set up for 40-60 years, and they have enrolled several thousand patients into those studies," he says. "I'm on that federal monitoring board and we look at the vaccine-safety data constantly. These studies are going very well."
The reasoning behind making children the highest priority comes from decades of experience with flu transmission, prevention strategies, infection monitoring and many other factors. Additionally, children younger than age 5 are at higher risk of complications from influenza.