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 In the review of past studies, researchers also found that pregnant
women had concerns about the safety of the flu vaccine and tended to
underestimate the risk that the virus posed to themselves and their
fetus.
“The research is clear that healthcare providers are not providing
advice to pregnant women about the importance and benefits of
getting vaccinated,” Marie Tarrant told Reuters Health in an email.
She worked on the study at Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine at the
University of Hong Kong.
“In addition, they are not making influenza vaccine available to
their pregnant clients,” she said. “By their silence, they are
sending a message that influenza vaccine is actually not that
important.”
One study found pregnant women were five times as likely to be
hospitalized with the flu as other women, Tarrant said.
Flu vaccines given to pregnant women not only immunize them but
protect their infants against the flu until they are six months old,
the researchers write in the journal Vaccine.
The World Health Organization recently identified pregnant women as
the highest priority group to receive seasonal flu vaccines. The
U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends the
vaccines for women who are pregnant during flu season.
Tarrant and her co-author Carol Yuet Sheung Yuen analyzed data from
45 studies to learn more about why pregnant women do or do not get
flu shots.
The studies included women from the U.S., Canada, Australia, Hong
Kong, India, Turkey and various European countries. Most of them
found that fewer than 60 percent of pregnant women received flu
shots, and one showed vaccination rates below two percent.
A recommendation from a healthcare provider was one of the most
consistent predictors of getting a flu shot, the researchers found.
Women whose providers recommended flu shots were between 20 and 100
times more likely to get vaccinated.
However, several studies found that providers offered negative
advice about flu shots and in some cases, explicitly discouraged
them.
The results were not surprising to Dr. Flor Munoz, a pediatrics and
infectious disease researcher at Baylor College of Medicine in
Houston, who was not involved in the current study.
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“If doctors recommended the vaccine, people would take it,” she told
Reuters Health. “This paper is asking providers to be more vocal in
recommending the vaccine to pregnant women.”
The primary reason obstetricians cite for not advising pregnant
women to get the vaccine, Munoz said, is that they do not stock it
in their offices.
“They don’t carry it,” she said. “They see it as a burden, and they
don’t think it’s worth it. For them to be able to get their return
on investment is difficult, and that’s why they don’t do it.”
The new review also found that pregnant women often worried about
vaccine safety and side effects. One study found that 45 percent of
pregnant women perceived the vaccine as unsafe and nearly 80 percent
believed it could cause birth defects.
Some pregnant women were particularly concerned that mercury,
present in certain flu vaccines, could harm their unborn children,
the authors write.
Multi-dose vials of the flu vaccine contain small amounts of
thimerosal, a mercury-containing preservative that prevents
bacterial growth. Single-dose vaccine vials do not contain the
preservative and are frequently available for pregnant women,
Tarrant said.
“The amount of thimerosal in influenza vaccines is very small, and
it has been shown repeatedly that it is not harmful,” she said.
“However, pregnant women may be more willing to accept the vaccine
without thimerosal. So often that is provided.”
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1n0o6qR
Vaccine, online July 2, 2014.
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