Swine flu vaccine to become available to children under five

November 19, 2009 by Shawn Douglas  
Filed under: News

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The swine flu vaccine will be made available to children from six months to five years of age across the UK.

The Scottish Government has announced today an extension of the UK-wide swine flu policy that will offer the vaccine to healthy children between the ages of six months to five years. A similar announcement is expected to be made later in England.

Scotland’s Health Secretary Nicola Sturgeon made the announcement, saying: “The decision has been made in line with independent scientific advice from the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI). It is their advice which has guided us so far in all the decisions around the vaccination program.”

“Advice from the JCVI is that young children are more at risk of contracting the virus, and the highest rate of hospitalizations has been in the under-five age group, so that is the key consideration.”

Sturgeon went on to say that most children that fall in the age range will have only “mild symptoms” and likely “will recover relatively quickly”, but stressed that it was better to be cautious.

Children will likely be invited to go to their local general practitioner to receive the vaccination, and will likely last though January of next year in order to reach everyone.

For the past few weeks, the British Government has been under pressure by the Conservative party to extend vaccinations to healthy children. Conservatives have cited statistics indicating that over 20 percent of the U.K.’s H1N1 deaths have been children under 14.

The Department of Health is expected later to release an update on the amount of people infected with N1H1 in England. Some suspected that a drop in the number of cases last week may have indicated that the situation was getting better.

However, England’s Chief Medical Officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, suggested that the drop may have in part been caused by the half-term break in schools. Schools are generally known to be locations where viruses tend to spread easily.

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