Pregnancy Health in the News

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Flu Shots in Pregnancy Protect Newborn. Really?

Here's the article. Read the complete text here.

A pregnant woman who gets a flu shot passes protection on to her fetus that lessens the newborn’s likelihood of contracting the flu during the first months of life, researchers report in the Oct. 9 New England Journal of Medicine.

Although the vaccine has been shown to be safe, no randomized trial has evaluated the shot’s effectiveness in a clinical setting — until now.

“I think this will now make a difference,” says study coauthor Mark Steinhoff, a pediatrician at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. “If you want to protect the baby and be careful, maybe the vaccine is a way to do that. I think more women will ask for it,” he says.

Vaccinating pregnant women against influenza is approved and even recommended by U.S. medical authorities and by the World Health Organization, but few mothers-to-be get a shot.

Things that make you go hmmmm... Well, flu shots still contain mercury and let's see... Mercury containing fish? Don't eat. Silver amalgam dental fillings? Don't get them during pregnancy, says the FDA. Why? They contain mercury. So why, why, why should pregnant women get the flu shot when it contains mercury. Maybe in the risk-benfit analysis, it is worth the possibility of mercury toxicity, but then why not just address this in the study.

Wow, I really am turning into Deirdre Imus!