“Monoclonals to prevent syncytial virus in all newborns”

2023-05-05 19:38:12

“Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) infection affects all children. In young patients it is one of the main causes of bronchiolitis which represents the main cause of hospitalization in the first year of life. More than 20% of infants develop RSV respiratory infection in the first year of life, and 4% of the cohort of these infants even require hospitalization. For this reason, protection is needed that covers all children, not only those born pre-term or with chronic pathologies, but also those born healthy and full-term because they are all at risk of contracting this serious infection. A goal we can achieve with a new monoclonal antibody approved in recent months by the EMA, i.e. nirsevimab, which, once administered in a single dose, has the characteristic of being able to be effective for at least 5 months, so as to be able to protect newborns throughout the season”. So Paolo Bonanni, full professor of Hygiene at the University of Florence, on the sidelines of the 56th national congress of the Italian Society of Hygiene, Preventive Medicine and Public Health (Siti) which closes today in Rome.

“With this tool – Bonanni assures us – we can immunize all children born during the season in which the virus circulates more (October-March) directly in the hospital, and ensure that children born outside the virus season (April- September), where there is no high risk of infection with RSV, are immunized in October, i.e. before the start of the RSV season”.

For the expert, however, “Aifa must classify the monoclonal antibody nirsevimab not as a therapeutic product, but as a product for prevention, also in such a way that it goes into the prevention budget: a fundamental aspect for it to be used on a large scale . Subsequently, we must make the medical, nursing and families understand how dangerous this infection is and how today we have a very important and very effective tool to be able to reduce cases of RSV disease”.

For Bonanni, prevention is “crucial”, he underlines, recalling the importance of the “vaccination schedule for life”, which recently, together with the Italian Society of Neonatology (Sin), recommended that nirsevimab be used in all newborns for the prevention of diseases of Rsv and included in a prevention plan and budget. Furthermore, he adds, “we hope soon to have a new National Vaccination Plan 2023-2025 but which sooner or later we should call National Immunization Plan and no longer prevention because these monoclonal antibodies we are talking about today are not a vaccine, but they work exactly as vaccine prevention”.