Posted on 03/21/2009 3:58:33 PM PDT by neverdem
Shots might prevent some birth defects caused by cytomegalovirus infections in moms-to-be
An experimental vaccine is effective half the time in stopping cytomegalovirus infection in women in their child-bearing years, researchers report in the March 19 New England Journal of Medicine.
No vaccine currently exists for cytomegalovirus, which can cause birth defects when it infects a pregnant woman. Because of this risk, vaccine researchers have targeted the virus for decades — without any clear benefit until now.
“This is the first vaccine that really shows prevention from infection with cytomegalovirus,” says Walla Dempsey, a microbiologist and immunologist at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Md., who wasn’t a researcher on this study.
Most people get infected by cytomegalovirus as children and have few complications or even symptoms. Nearly two-thirds of women in child-bearing years have already been infected with cytomegalovirus.
But roughly 27,000 first-time cytomegalovirus infections occur in pregnant women in the United States every year. These women don’t harbor home-grown antibodies — generated from a previous infection — that would lower the risk of re-infection, says Robert Pass, an infectious disease pediatrician at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, who coauthored the new study. As a result, such women have a one-in-three chance of passing the virus along to their fetuses via the placenta. At birth, infected babies have an 11 percent chance of having symptoms that include hearing damage, visual impairment, mental retardation and diminished motor skills.
From 1999 to 2006, Pass and his colleagues recruited 464 women in their childbearing years who had tested negative for cytomegalovirus antibodies.
Half the volunteers were randomly assigned to receive the vaccine in three shots spaced over six months. The other half got placebo shots over a similar time span. The researchers attempted to follow each participant...
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencenews.org ...
micro ping
For years as a blood donor, I showed as CMV negative, in a rare blood type. No wonder I got so many calls to donate.
Real classy your comment...
What’s your blood type, if I may ask?
“What’s your blood type, if I may ask?”
that’s ok, I’m waiting for the “all vaccines are evil” crowd.
O neg., abt. 6% of the Pop.
CMV Neg. is a subset of that.
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