Pregnant women are being urged to get a Covid booster jab this autumn to protect their newborn child after a study found babies to be far more vulnerable to the virus than other childhood age groups 🔴 Exclusive from BawdenTom
“Last year, the timing of vaccination was designed to optimise protection during pregnancy – giving the boost at the beginning of autumn, with the idea that this would maximise protection when we thought the peak of the wave would occur, in winter.
“Given that the risks of Covid infection during pregnancy are now likely to be lower than they were at the height of the pandemic, an interesting question is whether we should now move towards optimising the timing of vaccination to protect babies after they are born.” Of the 3.2 million children and teenagers in England with a first Covid infection, nearly 21,000 were hospitalised because of Covid. Of these, 7,115 were babies.
Professor Steve Griffin, of Leeds University, added: “There is an important element of protection delivered by antibodies that pass from the mother’s blood and, to a lesser extent, breast milk.
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Epidemiology of co-infections in pregnant women living with human immunodeficiency virus 1 in rural Gabon: a cross-sectional study - Infectious Diseases of PovertyBackground There is no recent epidemiological data on HIV infection in Gabon, particularly in pregnant women. To close this gap, an HIV-prevalence survey was conducted among Gabonese pregnant women, followed by a cross-sectional case–control study in which the prevalence of various co-infections was compared between HIV-positive and HIV-negative pregnant women. Methods Between 2018 and 2019, data for the HIV-prevalence survey were collected retrospectively in 21 Gabonese antenatal care centres (ANCs). Subsequently, for the prospective co-infection study, all HIV-positive pregnant women were recruited who frequented the ANC in Lambaréné and a comparator sub-sample of HIV-negative pregnant women was recruited; these activities were performed from February 2019 to February 2020. The mean number of co-infections was ascertained and compared between HIV-positive and HIV-negative women. Additionally, the odds for being co-infected with at least one co-infection was evaluated and compared between HIV-positive and HIV-negative women. Results HIV-positivity was 3.9% (646/16,417) among pregnant women. 183 pregnant women were recruited in the co-infection study. 63% of HIV-positive and 75% of HIV-negative pregnant women had at least one co-infection. There was a trend indicating that HIV-negative women were more often co-infected with sexually transmitted infections (STIs) than HIV-positive women [mean (standard deviation, SD): 2.59 (1.04) vs 2.16 (1.35), respectively; P = 0.056]; this was not the case for vector-borne infections [mean (SD): 0.47 (0.72) vs 0.43 (0.63), respectively; P = 0.59]. Conclusions Counterintuitively, the crude odds for concomitant STIs was lower in HIV-positive than in HIV-negative women. The change of magnitude from the crude to adjusted OR is indicative for a differential sexual risk factor profile among HIV-positive and HIV-negative women in this population. This might potentially be explained by the availability of sexual health care counselling fo
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