Chickenpox Vaccination For All Children and Pregnant Women
Posted by: Andrew Cheetham in Health-Physical And MentalChildren and pregnant women could be routinely vaccinated against chickenpox.
Options being considered by government advisers include combining the jab with the MMR triple vaccine, creating a four-in-one shot.
The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation is also considering vaccinating adults against shingles, which is caused by the same virus.
Recommendations made by the expert panel of doctors, nurses and scientists are almost always turned into health policy.
Child health specialists say mass vaccination is the best defence against chickenpox, which claims to up to 50 lives a year, 40 of them children.
But critics fear the vaccination will overload the immune systems of infants, who are already given 25 vaccines in ten shots by the age of 13 months.
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