News
Vaccine Prevents Birth Defects due to Cytomegalovirus
CMV is a common virus you may not notice any symptoms of it if you are adult, but According to the CDC, CMV is the most common virus transmitted to a pregnant woman's fetus. The most likely problems that it may cause are problems with heart in newborn child.
About one in 750 children born with CMV develops permanent disabilities because of this virus.
In order to prevent these effects, Merck and GlaxoSmithKline develop a new vaccine. An experimental vaccine may disable cytomegalovirus (CMV) in women, and this in turn may decrease the probability of CMV-related birth defects in their children.
The study of new CMV vaccine involved 464 women aged 14-40 in Alabama. When the study started, none of the women were pregnant and none had CMV in their blood. All women were give three shots of the vaccine or placebo.
Results were examined later, in three years. At that time, 8% of the women who had gotten the CMV vaccine received CMV infection, and above 14% of women who had gotten the placebo shots. The conclusion is that the efficacy of vaccine was 50%.
The vaccine is quite well tolerated. Only one women in group had serious postvaccinal reaction such as fever, muscle pain, rash. Most women had no or minor reactions like joint pain.
As for babies born from vaccine mothers, fifteen of them had serious adverse events, but only seven of them were born to women who had gotten the experimental vaccine.
At the moment, the conclusion is that further study is needed.
