Vaccine found effective against most severe type of pneumonia

"Universal health care did not exist in Laos until recently, and supplementary oxygen treatment was prohibitively expensive for families," she said.

In October 2013, Laos introduced the PCV13 vaccine into its national childhood vaccination program, supported by Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. But the Ministry of Health requested evidence of the health benefits of the vaccine to support its ongoing use.

MCRI Professor Fiona Russell said Asian countries have been very slow to introduce PCV13 into their national immunisation programs.

"These results provide a compelling argument to continue childhood PCV13 vaccination in Laos and for its introduction into similar countries with high death rates from pneumonia," she said.

Professor Russell said the study also described a simple, low-cost single hospital-based method to assess vaccine effectiveness that was feasible for other low and middle-income countries to adopt. Measuring the success of this vaccine would usually require thousands of cases collected over many years of surveillance, and often involving many hospitals, she said

"In this study, we enrolled children hospitalised with hypoxic and non-hypoxic pneumonia in a single hospital and compared pneumococcal vaccination rates between the two groups to determine vaccine effectiveness over about four years," she said.

Globally, lower respiratory infections, including pneumonia, are a leading cause of death in children under five years old, causing 800,000 deaths annually, predominantly in low- and middle-income countries.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666606520300146?via=ihub