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Vaccine Prevents Pneumonia in Children

© Neal Rolfe Chamberlain

The 39th Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy (ICAAC,) sponsored by the American Society for Microbiology just ended (Sept. 29, 1999) and from it came information about many potentially useful treatments for human diseases. One such discovery may prevent a disease that kills approximately 1.2 million people a year in our world and is responsible for nearly 40 percent of pneumonia deaths in children under age 5. This disease is called pneumococcal pneumonia.

Pneumococcal pneumonia is caused by a bacterium called Streptococcus pneumoniae. This organism can infect our lungs (pneumonia), sinuses (sinusitis), inner ears (earaches; otitis media), and the membranes that line our brains (meningitis). Even with adequate antibiotic therapy, 20 percent of people with pneumococcal pneumonia die each year. This bacterium survives in our bodies by producing an outer coat made of sugars. This coat is called a capsule. White blood cells cannot engulf and kill Streptococcus pneumoniae that produce a capsule. However, if our bodies make antibodies to this bacterial capsule then those antibodies will bind to the capsule and help the white blood cells engulf and kill Streptococcus pneumoniae.

A vaccine has been available for quite a while that will cause our bodies to make antibodies to these bacterial capsules. The current vaccine is made up of the bacterial capsular material and does not contain any bacteria and works quite well in adults. Unfortunately, this capsular material does not work well at making antibodies in children under 2 years of age. To get around this problem, Steven Black, MD, and Henry Shinefield, MD are using a pneumococcal vaccine that contains the capsular material chemically bound to a protein to see if it will protect children from getting pneumococcal pneumonia. When protein is bound to the pneumococcal capsule, young children can make antibodies to Streptococcus pneumoniae. Small studies have shown this new vaccine is effective so far at preventing pneumococcal pneumonia in children.

To fully test this vaccine Black and Shinefield decided to conduct a much larger study that involved 38,000 children and took 3 years to complete. They found that this new protein-bound pneumococcal capsule vaccine reduced pneumonia cases by 33 percent and severe pneumonia cases by 73 percent. It also lowered the number of earaches these children experienced. This very promising and life-saving vaccine still needs to be approved by the FDA (United States Food and Drug Administration). If it is approved, we may be able to stop this very deadly pneumonia.

For more information on this bacterium and pneumonia:

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