AMMAN — Starting March 1, the Ministry of Health will begin vaccinating newborns against pneumococcal diseases, a ministry official said.
Mohammad Abdullat, head of the ministry’s communicable diseases department, said the ministry received a donation of 347,500 doses of the Prevnar pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (PCV7) from the Pfizer pharmaceutical company, and will distribute them to the Kingdom’s maternity and childcare centres to vaccinate children born on or after January 1, 2012.
He noted that the vaccine is safe and approved by the Jordan Food and Drug Administration.
Abdullat told The Jordan Times that the ministry would like to include this vaccine in its national vaccination programme, “but it is very expensive and we cannot cover the cost”.
The cost of each dose is $120, he said, and each child is given two doses.
Pneumococcal disease is estimated by the World Health Organisation to cause up to 1.6 million deaths each year. Approximately half of these deaths occur in infants and children under five in the developing world.
According to a Pan American Health Organisation report, pneumococcal disease results in approximately two deaths per hour or 20,200 deaths every year in infants and children in the Americas. The disease is caused by a common bacterium, pneumococcus, which can attack different parts of the body.
“When this bacteria invades the lungs, it causes the most common form of community-acquired bacterial pneumonia; when the bacteria invades the bloodstream, it causes bacteremia; and when it invades the covering of the brain, it causes meningitis,” according to the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases in the US.
In Jordan, a study conducted in 2010 showed that around one-third of newborns in the country carry Streptococcus pneumoniae bacteria, which causes pneumococcal disease.
According to the study, conducted by the Ministry of Health in cooperation with the German-Jordanian University and Pfizer-Wyeth, the prevalence of Streptococcus pneumoniae among newborns in the Kingdom stands at 33 per cent, well above the international average of 19-25 per cent.
However, according to the US Centres for Disease Control (CDC), Prevnar PCV7, which protects against seven strains of pneumococcal bacteria, has since been replaced by PCV13, which protects against six more.
According to the CDC, before PCV7 was introduced, these seven strains or serotypes were responsible for over 80 per cent of severe pneumococcal infections among children. Now that PCV7 has been in use since 2000, there is significantly less pneumococcal disease, but other strains of pneumococcal bacteria have become more common, particularly one serotype, 19A. PCV13 includes the original seven serotypes in PCV7 plus the six additional serotypes, including 19A.
