By Will Boggs, MD
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Protection against hepatitis B appears to drop off
in adolescents who got the hepatitis B vaccine beginning at birth, according
to a new report.
Dr. Stephanie R. Bialek from the US Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention, Atlanta, Georgia, and colleagues evaluated the occurrence of
breakthrough infections and the persistence of protective levels of antibodies
against hepatitis B in 105 teens who had been given the recommended series of
hepatitis B vaccine starting at birth 15 years earlier.
Only eight of them showed evidence of new hepatitis B infection, the authors
report, and no participant was chronically infected.
On the other hand, only seven of the other 97 participants had relatively high
antibody levels against hepatitis B at the 15-year follow-up, the researchers
report in The Pediatric Infectious Disease.
Less than half of the participants who elected to get a booster dose of
hepatitis B vaccine had an expected antibody response at 14 days, which "might
indicate waning immunity," Bialek's team found.
"At this point in time, we do not have any evidence from our surveillance
systems of breakthrough hepatitis B virus infections occurring among
vaccinated adolescents and therefore do not recommend additional doses of
hepatitis B vaccine for adolescents or children who already received three
doses of hepatitis B vaccine," Bialek told Reuters Health.
However, he added, "We need to continue surveillance for hepatitis B among
vaccinated adolescents ... for making decisions about whether the additional
doses of hepatitis B vaccine should be recommended in the future."
SOURCE: The Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal, October 2008.