Pregnant women should get flu jab
Due to the report of The Independent “Researches resulted that pregnant women should to get their annual flu jab as they have a five times greater risk of a stillbirth if they are admitted to hospital with swine flu.”
This based on a study that followed 256 pregnant women admitted to hospital with the 2009 strain of the swine flu virus, called H1N1. The study compared their pregnancy outcomes to 1,220 healthy pregnant women. Women with swine flu were found to have a significantly higher rate of adverse events than uninfected pregnant women. This included about a fourfold higher rate of stillbirth and fivefold higher rate of neonatal death (when the baby dies within 28 days of life).
It promotes to raise awareness of the importance of pregnant women having the seasonal flu vaccine, which now also protects against swine flu. Pregnant women are one of the high-risk groups advised to have an annual flu vaccination, and swine flu is predicted to be one of the main flu viruses circulating during the 2011/12 winter.
It is important to know that infant death is relatively rare, and these figures are extrapolations of quite small numbers (of the 256 women with swine flu, 10 had stillbirth or their babies died between 24 weeks of pregnancy and within one week of delivery (perinatal mortality). These increases in risk sound alarming. Due to the small amount of data that was available for this study, and other limitations, these findings should be viewed with some caution.
Although this need for other research however, influenza is a main risk in pregnancy, and these findings do support the recommendation for pregnant women to be vaccinated against seasonal flu.
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