Women who are vaccinated against whooping cough in the third trimester of their pregnancy allow their baby to have a better level of antibodies at birth.
Whooping cough kills about 300,000 people a year, particularly in developing countries, according to thePastor Institute. Many developed countries, such as Australia, France or the United States have implemented widespread vaccination, which is generally done in early childhood. Because for a very long time, whooping cough was considered a disease of infants.
For more than thirty years, whooping cough has been making a comeback, especially in the United States. It’s not not the fault of the vaccine itself, according to a study published last April. Researchers are now trying to find the best time to vaccinate to be better protected. According to a new study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, being vaccinated in the third trimester of pregnancy ensures the highest level of antibodies in the newborn.
Three times more antibodies
To carry out this study, American researchers analyzed a group of 626 newborns. Among them, some of their mothers had received the Tdap vaccine (which protects against diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough) in the third trimester of pregnancy and another had not. Babies whose mothers had been vaccinated thus presented an anti-pertussis antibody concentration of 47.3 IU/mL in the blood, compared to only 12.9 IU/mL for newborns whose mothers had not. not received a vaccine.
Thus, the babies were three times more protected against whooping cough! The study goes further. The researchers found that the antibody levels were even higher when the vaccination was done at the beginning of the third trimester of pregnancy, that is to say between the twenty-seventh and thirtieth week.
Pertussis, a deadly disease
Generalizing vaccination at the beginning of the third trimester of pregnancy could thus prevent new cases of whooping cough as much as possible. It is a respiratory disease and very contagious. It is transmitted orally and can be fatal in infants, and cause severe complications in young children (encephalopathy, epileptic seizures). It’s not just the youngest who get whooping cough. Adults are increasingly susceptible to the disease. Usually this is because they were not vaccinated at birth.
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