Flu Before “Boo”

 

The American Academy of Pediatrics updated its policy statement last week on “the routine use of influenza vaccine and antiviral medicines in the prevention and treatment of influenza in children during the 2022–2023 influenza season.”

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends annual influenza vaccination of all children without medical contraindications starting at 6 months of age. Influenza vaccination is an important strategy for protecting children and the broader community, as well as reducing the overall burden of respiratory illnesses when other viruses, including severe acute respiratory syndrome-coronavirus 2, are cocirculating. Any licensed influenza vaccine appropriate for age and health status can be administered, ideally as soon as possible in the season, without preference for one product or formulation over another.

 

The policy statement’s primary author, Kris Bryant, M.D., says many parents don’t fully appreciate just how severe a disease influenza can be, even in previously health children and teenagers:

Most people who get the flu are sick for at least a week. But some people get much sicker. Getting vaccinated is the best way to prevent influenza and the serious complications that can result from it—especially for those with high-risk conditions like asthma. For example, flu can lead to pneumonia. Kids with flu also can develop brain inflammation as well as febrile and non-febrile seizures. The flu vaccine keeps people out of the hospital—it stops serious illness and deaths from influenza.

Influenza causes thousands of deaths in the United States every year. About 33 to 199 children and teens die each year of flu—80% of those children were not fully vaccinated. Even children who are otherwise healthy and have no other medical conditions can be hospitalized with flu and develop life-threatening complications.

 

The composition of the 2022-2023 quadrivalent influenza vaccine has been updated this year for two strains, one influenza A and one influenza B; the other two components were left unchanged:

• A/Victoria/2570/2019 (H1N1) pdm09-like virus

• A/Darwin/9/2021 (H3N2)-like virus (updated)

• B/Austria/1359417/2021-like virus (B/Victoria lineage) (updated)

• B/Phuket/3073/2013-like virus (B/Yamagata lineage)

 

AHN Pediatrics offices are gearing up for a busy flu season. Vaccines will soon be available for all ages beginning at 6 months old, and some offices will be offering vaccines for parents, too. Other routine immunizations, including COVID vaccines, can be given at the same time as flu shots.

For any child under 9 years of age receiving the vaccine for the first time, two shots given one month apart are required. Kids who received only one shot in the past or whose vaccination status is unknown should also get two shots this fall. Parents should keep this timeline in mind and schedule the first dose as soon as possible so that everyone can be vaccinated by Halloween (Flu before “boo”).

Many offices will be holding special flu vaccine clinics this fall to get as many kids protected against what Katherine J. Wu expects to be a doozy of an outbreak after two very quiet, COVID-mediated seasons:

After skipping two seasons in the Southern Hemisphere, flu spent 2022 hopping across the planet’s lower half with more fervor than it’s had since the COVID crisis began. And of the three years of the pandemic that have played out so far, this one is previewing the strongest signs yet of a rough flu season ahead.

That does not bode terribly well for those of us up north. The same viruses that seed outbreaks in the south tend to be the ones that sprout epidemics here as the seasons do their annual flip. “I take the south as an indicator,” says Seema Lakdawala, a flu-transmission expert at Emory University. And should flu return here, too, with a vengeance, it will collide with a population that hasn’t seen its likes in years, and is already trying to marshal responses to several dangerous pathogens at once.

 

Watch this short video from the AAP explaining why influenza vaccine is still the best tool we have to prevent serious illness and complications in kids.

 

 

source http://www.thepediablog.com/2022/09/13/flu-before-boo/