St. Louis doctors are recommending pregnant women and people 60 and older get a new vaccine for the respiratory syncytial virus.
The illness is the leading cause of hospitalizations for infants in the country, and this winter marks the first when a vaccine is available to make people’s RSV symptoms less life-threatening.
Earlier this year, federal regulators approved the first RSV vaccines for adults 60 or older and pregnant women. When a pregnant woman takes the vaccine during the third trimester, she passes along immunity to her fetus.
That protects infants, who are most at risk from becoming very sick, said Dr. Melissa Tepe, an OB-GYN and chief medical officer at Affinia Health community health centers.
“We've always kind of had to suffer through RSV,” she said. “There was no vaccine or prevention, besides the usual things like hand hygiene and distancing. And so this is really exciting.”
Transmission is beginning to rise in the region, Tepe said. Winter is when hospitalizations related to RSV, COVID-19 and other respiratory illnesses have historically been at their highest.
“If you've ever had a newborn suffering from RSV, especially hospitalized, and having trouble breathing and eating, it's really heartbreaking and exhausting,” she said. “And so if we can prevent some of that, we would really like to get the word out this year.”
RSV infects the lungs and makes it hard to breathe. It’s most dangerous for infants because their lungs are so small, said Dr. Jason Newland, a pediatric infectious disease physician at St. Louis Children’s Hospital.
“When you're little, you don't have the big expanse of lungs that you and I have,” he said. “And so it's hard to get oxygen in. What happens is the baby starts breathing super fast.”
Babies can’t take the newly approved vaccines, Newland said. The best way to protect them is for their mothers to get the shot while pregnant. The shot is only recommended between the 32nd and 36th weeks of pregnancy.
Newborns can also benefit from an injection of antibodies, he said. But that therapy is right now hard to find.
Newland said he hopes the vaccines will decrease the number of babies struggling to breathe in the region’s hospitals.
“We can see that we know our hospitals are filled,” he said. “And our pediatric hospitals have some of the highest hospitalizations that we've had. And a lot of that's made up of respiratory viruses like RSV.”
Unlike with the flu or COVID-19, health workers are not required to report cases of RSV to government agencies. That makes it difficult to track how many people are sick with the virus, Newland said.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention measures the percentage of positive RSV tests. In the region that includes Missouri, the CDC reports 14% of antigen tests and 17% of PCR tests administered have come back positive in mid-December.
