Rotavirus Vaccine

Reported November 2006

PHILADELPHIA (Ivanhoe Broadcast News) -- Two-year-old Jacob Lowry is full of energy. But when he was 11 months old, he caught a rotavirus infection. Constant vomiting and diarrhea dehydrated Jacob so badly, he barely moved. His parents rushed him to the ER.

"That is so scary, no matter what your child's situation, to see this person who just ... doesn't have the energy to move a limb or to look up at you or to shed a tear," Jacob's mother, Wendy, says. "That scares you, very much."

Rotavirus affects 2.7 million children under 5 in the United States every year. Virtually every child gets it. It's marked by vomiting, diarrhea and fever and can be severe and in rare cases fatal. But a new vaccine is wiping out the threat of Rotavirus for thousands of kids.

The FDA has now approved RotaTeq, a vaccine that helps prevent rotavirus infections in babies. Infectious disease experts like Paul Offit, M.D., administer RotaTeq orally -- when children are 2-, 4- and 6-months old.

"It goes through the stomach into the small intestine, where it induces an immune response, and that immune response protects you from getting fever and vomiting and diarrhea," Dr. Offit, of Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, tells Ivanhoe.

Rapid dehydration is the greatest danger to children who get the virus. Parents take 250,000 kids to the ER, and 70,000 are hospitalized.

RotaTeq took infectious disease experts 26 years to develop. Doctors tested it in 12 countries over four years. They believe it will take two years for all kids to routinely get RotaTeq shots and expect it to reduce hospitalizations by 98 percent in the United States.

In the developing world, however, the virus' effects are more devastating. It kills 2,000 children a day. RotaTeq's developers hope to distribute the vaccine in developing countries soon.

Wendy wishes RotaTeq was around when Jacob was a baby. "I just think it's not worth putting children at risk if there are vaccines out there that are safe and can protect them from some of these things," she says. "Certainly, I would give it to him now."

The American Society for Microbiology contributed to the information contained in the TV portion of this report.

Click here to Go Inside This Science or contact:

The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia
Philadelphia, PA
(215) 590-1000

American Society for Microbiology
Washington, D.C. 20036-2904
(202) 737-3600
http://www.asm.org

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