Xunta to include intranasal vaccine for children aged 2 to 5 years in next flu campaign

Xunta to include intranasal vaccine for children aged 2 to 5 years in next flu campaignI propose

The Galician Health Service (Sergas) will manage Starting in September, intranasal vaccines Alfonso Rueda, acting president of Xunta, announced yesterday that influenza prevention will be targeted at children aged 2 to 5 years old.

After the government’s weekly meeting, the region’s top leader explained that Xunta will allocate 550,000 euros to the program aimed at obtaining 30,000 doses of the vaccine.

The Galician president explained that the Council gave the green light to the process of including this vaccine in the children’s calendar, as he announced a few weeks ago, in which case Xunta is a pioneer in the introduction of the vaccine “globally”. Certain vaccines.

Sergas predicts that the effectiveness of this intranasal vaccine “will be greater” because it activates the local immune system, thereby enhancing neutralization of the virus in the mucosa at the point of entry.

Rueda explains This intranasal vaccine will replace punctures When administered “directly through the nasal mucosa, where many infections may originate.”

The incidence of group A Streptococcus is low

Additionally, according to the Ministry of Health, recent studies have shown Reduced incidence of group A streptococcal infections

Children receiving intranasal influenza vaccine.

Nonetheless, he once again claimed that Galicia is consolidating itself as a “benchmark for vaccination, especially for children”, like other sera included in the Galician calendar in recent years. Galicia was the first to announce influenza vaccination for children aged 1 to 5 years in the 2022/2023 campaign, achieving the highest coverage among the communities where vaccination was rolled out in this calendar.

The acting president of Galicia has set a goal of achieving “more than 60%” coverage of children aged 2 to 5 years (about 27,000 patients) with this intranasal vaccine. In the last immunization campaign, the compliance rate was about 50% and reached 83% for infants aged 6 months to one year old.