Like this article?
Get your free daily medical news from Physician's First Watch.
H1N1 Update: Questions About Vaccine Dosing in Younger Children
Patients might ask about reports that younger children may receive only one dose of the H1N1 vaccine, not two.
On Friday, the World Health Organization's immunization advisory group recommended that in countries where children are given early vaccination priority, one dose of the vaccine should be administered to as many children as possible.
The U.S. Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices currently recommends two vaccine doses for children aged 6 months to 9 years. CDC Director Thomas Frieden said on Friday that the National Institutes of Health may release additional pediatric data from clinical trials as early as this week. "If the data show the difference, we will reconsider our recommendations," he said. "For the time being ... we're sticking with what the ACIP has recommended."
The CDC also reported that 19 children in the U.S. died of H1N1 influenza in the previous week.
LINK(S):
WHO update (Free)
CDC news briefing transcript (Free)
ACIP recommendations (Free)
Associated Press story (Free)
Previous Physician's First Watch coverage of pediatric dosing of H1N1 vaccine (Free)
Published in Physician's First Watch November 2, 2009
Your Remark:
To ensure that your Reader Remark is not formatted as one long paragraph, precede new paragraphs with either a blank line or an indentation.