According to the hospital, thanks to good vaccination coverage, Latvia was a “diphtheria-free zone” until last week, but now a local outbreak of diphtheria has started and several unvaccinated children and adults are currently in the hospital.
BKUS emphasizes that diphtheria can be potentially fatal, but it is possible to protect against it with vaccination. At the moment, it is not yet possible to say how severe the consequences of this disease will be on the health and future lives of the children recently brought to the hospital, “if the children survive”, the hospital’s statement said.
“With the increase in the proportion of unvaccinated children, both at the age of children after the pandemic, when children have not received vaccines at all due to the different beliefs of their parents, and among adults, when they forgot to receive or decided not to receive vaccinations paid for by the state after ten years, the number of people susceptible to dangerous infections has also increased in our country , and diphtheria has returned,” emphasizes Dace Zavadska, head of the BKUS Family Vaccination Center.
Zavadska states that infectious agents may have been brought in by travelers from other countries or circulated in Latvia. The sick children had already been taken to kindergarten and school with the first symptoms, so there is a big risk that the infection will spread and there will be more sick people.
She reminds that for several years pregnant women have been available for state-paid vaccination against diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough to protect their children from infection. The vaccine is safe, able to protect both the pregnant woman and the child in the first months of life, before he develops specific immunity from the vaccines he received.
Unfortunately, several babies with whooping cough have already been in intensive care at BKUS this year, who could have been protected from the course of a serious illness if their mother had received the vaccine paid for by the state during pregnancy, emphasizes Zavadska. One infant who contracted whooping cough has died, and there have been children with tuberculosis and unvaccinated children with chickenpox in a very serious condition.
“Parents and also many doctors have not seen how severe the course of these vaccine-regulated infectious diseases can be, because they have not circulated in our society for a long time thanks to effective vaccines,” added Zavadska.
BKUS reminds that children must receive the first three doses of diphtheria vaccine by the age of one year. For primary vaccination, three doses of the combined vaccine are prescribed with an interval of at least four weeks.
Then, until the age of 15 months, the fourth dose should be received, at the age of seven – the fifth dose, and at the age of 14 – the sixth dose. After receiving the sixth dose, a booster vaccination against diphtheria is given to everyone every 10 years for life.
If the symptoms of the disease are not so acute at the beginning and the child is not taken to the doctor in the first three days, even with the administration of large doses of the specific diphtheria immunoglobulin, life may not be saved – it is not for nothing that it is emphasized that this is a deadly infection, reminds BKUS.
Diphtheria tends to have severe and lasting effects on the central nervous system, kidney and cardiovascular system. In those who have been vaccinated and come in contact with the infectious agent, in some cases the disease may start, but it proceeds in a mild form without complications.
According to BKUS, at the beginning of the disease, all those infected are spreaders of the infection, and if in this way infectious agents meet unvaccinated people, the consequences are very severe or fatal, as the toxins of the diphtheria bacterium spread to all systems of the body.
The most vulnerable and the most severely affected by dangerous infectious diseases in the first months of life are the smallest, so BKUS calls on all pregnant women to receive the combined vaccine at the appointed time and protect their baby.
2024-09-09 18:16:46