Vaccine study from the USA shows: Children born in October are less likely to catch flu

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A study published in the US specialized journal “The BMJ” on Wednesday examines the optimal time for flu vaccination in young children and reaches surprising results. Christopher Worsham, Charles Bray, Anupam Jena and Joseph Newhouse found that children born in October were significantly more likely to be vaccinated against flu than their peers. And that’s not all: Children in October caught the flu much less often. To do this, researchers looked at how many people were diagnosed with flu.

For the study, researchers at Harvard Medical School examined anonymized health insurance records of more than 800,000 children ages 2 to 5. All of them received the flu vaccine between August and January 2011-2018.

2.7 percent of children born and vaccinated in October were diagnosed with flu during this period. For comparison: for children born and vaccinated in August or January, the figure was three percent. For children born and vaccinated in September or December, the figure was still 2.9 percent. The vaccination rate of children born in November was 2.8 percent.

This is the best time to get a flu vaccine

“There are so many variables when it comes to the timing and severity of flu season or a person’s risk of getting sick, many of which are out of our control,” said Anupam Jena, one of the lead scientists on the study. “One of the things we have control over is the timing of the vaccine, and it seems like October is actually the best month for kids to get their flu vaccine.”

Jena and her colleague Worsham had already examined how month of birth determines the likelihood of children being vaccinated against flu in a study published in 2020 in the New England Journal of Medicine. Young children in the United States are usually examined each year around their birthday. This is also when they receive most of their vaccines.

Children’s immune systems are not weak

However, flu vaccination cannot generally be given in spring and summer. Parents will not make a new appointment as soon as the vaccine becomes available again. This means that children whose birthdays are in the spring or summer often do not get the flu vaccine.

“This study may help people determine the best time to give their children the flu vaccine, especially for those not born in October,” Worsham said.

Even if young children constantly feel cold, their immune systems are in no way weaker than those of adults, as scientists discovered several years ago. “Adults don’t get sick that often because we have memories of these viruses that protect us,” Donna Farber of Columbia University Medical Irving Center in New York said at the time. (No)

Source : Blick