An immunocompetent adult in contact with a contagious patient (who has pimples) must be vaccinated against chickenpox within three days, recalls in a study the National Institute of Health and Medical Research (Inserm). This preventive act would reduce by a quarter the cases of chickenpox in adults each year. However, this recommendation is little followed by the population.
To highlight the importance of this advice, a team of researchers built a mathematical model to project the contamination of the disease.
To do this, they used data from the Sentinels network, responsible for monitoring various infectious diseases.
The results of this research show that post-exposure vaccination of adults would reduce the number of adult cases infected each year by more than a quarter and also reduce the number of hospitalizations following the disease by 31%. In practice, 16 vaccinations of exposed adults would prevent an additional case of chickenpox. And again, it could be a low estimate.
“We took pessimistic figures in terms of the percentage of adults immunized following an infection in childhood, attendance at medical offices by exposed adults, vaccine efficacy” specifies Cécile Souty, study engineer and co-author of the work. “The potential of post-exposure vaccination in the event of optimal application of the recommendations could therefore be greater than that estimated by this model,” she concludes.
Chickenpox, a dangerous disease for adults
A number of adults have escaped chickenpox. This childhood illness is very common and most often benign. It heals in 1 or 2 weeks. In France, the vaccination against chickenpox is not compulsory for infants, but the High Council of Public Health recommends it on the other hand for teenagers and people at risk (adults and pregnant women).
Indeed, this contagious pathology can sometimes lead, in adults, to complications such as superinfections of the skin, pulmonary infections or neurological damage. Therefore, the benefits of vaccination would be significant. Chickenpox now affects 32,000 adults per year.
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