Friday, October 29, 2010

New pneumococca PC vaccine (PCV 13)

We're planning to travel to Taiwan in either December this year or March next year. I spent several hours this morning looking at Taiwan's CDC website. I looked at the vaccine schedule in Taiwan and tracked down vaccine and disease info in Taiwan to try and figure out if we need to get those vaccines. My eyes are crossing now, but at least I've got Astroboy's vaccine schedule down. In addition, we're going to add a vaccine to Thumper's schedule.

Some of the vaccines I was looking at are Japanese encephalitis, BCG, HepA, HepB, and PCV. After hours of reading, I decided to just get the PCV.

BCG is recommended by Taiwan CDC. It's a vaccine for tuberculosis. I was relieved to learn that if you're not going to travel to remote villages and stay in Taiwan for a long time, you can skip the Japanese encephalitis, BGC and HepA vaccines. Also learned that HepB really is transmitted via blood and sex. There's a higher rate of infection in Taiwan (10-15%) than US (0.5%?) but it's mostly because it was passed through babies. Since they've started vaccination program for HepB, that rate has gone down. So I don't need to worry about it as much.

As for PCV, apparently the PCV 13 vaccine just came out this year, replacing the PCV 7 vaccine. One of the strains it protects against is A19. In my googling, I found news report of kids dying from A19 strain in Taiwan. A lot of these strains are immune to antibiotics in East and Southeast Asia due to the prevalent use of antibiotics. And transmission season is in the fall/winter. So we're definitely getting this vaccine for both kids before we go back.

Astroyboy definite has a more aggressive vaccine schedule compared to Thumper due to our travel schedule and outbreak of pertussis in California. His schedule for the next 6 months are:

  • 2 Month - DTaP
  • 3 Month - Pc
  • 4 Month - DTaP
  • 5 Month - Pc
  • 6 Month - Pc (month before we leave for Taiwan)

I will have to decide what to do about the rest of the vaccine after we come back from our trip.

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