New York, Aug 10 : In the midst of a long-running debate over the efficacy of the well-known tuberculosis (TB) vaccine Bacille Calmette-Guerin (BCG) A recent study released in The Lancet Global Health suggests that the vaccine protects against the disease in children younger than of five and not in adults and adolescents. BCG is considered to be one of the most frequently administered vaccines in the world.
It is more than 100 years old, it’s the only vaccine that has been used to treat TB which affects over 10 million people every year.
BCG vaccinations at birth offer an important protection against TB -however, it is only in children who are less than five years of age.However, that protection could diminish as children grow older According to researchers at the Boston University School of Public Health (BUSPH).
They recommended that children who are over 10 years of age and adult must receive the booster BCG vaccine.
eventually, a different, supplementary vaccine, since the BCG booster could have limited effectiveness to protect against TB beyond the age of.
“Unlike the majority of the Covid-19 mRNA vaccines that we know are extremely effective, there is an ongoing debate about the BCG vaccine’s effectiveness and the duration of protection and whether the vaccine works in specific contexts,” said lead author Leonardo Martinez, Assistant Professor of epidemiology at BUSPH.
“Our findings suggest that BCG vaccination is effective in the prevention of tuberculosis in young children.Because tuberculosis in children is a severe and debilitating illness, BCG vaccination should continue to be administered,” he added.
However, as the results indicate that the vaccine is ineffective in adults and adolescents, “boosting immune protection is required in older people,” Martinez said.”Novel vaccines are urgently needed to complement BCG vaccination in high-risk settings.”
The results are based on a new analysis that reveals information from the past 10 years from high-burden environments in 17 countries that include South Africa, China, Vietnam, Indonesia, Uganda, The Gambia, and Brazil.
The study team looked at the individual level of results from 26 longitudinal studies that comprised almost 70,000 participants who were exposed to TB from 1998 until the year 2018.
For all children younger than five years of age, BCG vaccination was 37 percent effective.Researchers could not find conclusive evidence to prove that the vaccine protected children older than 10 or in adults.
If they focused on only the pulmonary TB issue, BCG vaccination was 19 percent effective, however this effect was not seen in the case of young children.
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