Free Vaccine Available to Prevent Deadly Pneumonia Bacteria

The Ministry of Health and Wellness is hoping to protect the children and elderly of Belize from hospitalization and death due to pneumonia and other related infections by making the PCV-Thirteen vaccine free to the public and available at all health facilities countrywide. Shane Williams has this story.

 

Shane Williams, Reporting

This shot being administered by UB nursing student Brea McKay, costs more than three hundred and fifty dollars at private health facilities. It is the PCV-Thirteen, and it helps to prevent hospitalization and death from pneumonia, meningitis and other streptococcus pneumoniae infection in the young and elderly.

 

Nurse Lylia Middleton, Expanding Program Immunization Manager, MoHW

“The PCV-Thirteen vaccine is a vaccine known as Pneumococcal thirteen vaccine. It prevents against streptococcal pneumonia, infections, and these infection would cause diseases such as pneumonia, meningitis, which is inflammation of the brain and spinal cord and sinusitis, ear infection and even blood infection.”

 

Many Belizeans die from infections that the PCV-Thirteen prevents. The World Health Organization estimates that infections deriving from Streptococcus pneumoniae kills about three hundred thousand children under five years old worldwide and more than two hundred thousand adults over the age of seventy annually.

 

Nurse Lylia Middleton

“Pneumonia is very prevalent and even in, especially in our elderly and our young population. So we have seen a lot of people dying from pneumonia or admitted to the hospital with pneumonia, and that is why we saw a need to get this vaccine.”

 

Five to ten percent of healthy adults and twenty to forty percent of healthy children are living with the bacteria that leads to pneumonia and meningitis.

 

Nurse Lylia Middleton

“People can be carriers and then they don’t have any signs or symptom. Well, otherwise, if your immune system is, is not proper, then the signs and symptoms would come. You would have this cough. You have fever, you have this chestiness and then that would be a sign that something is wrong with you.”

 

In 2010, the Ministry made PCV-Ten available for free to the public, but for only children two months to five years old. Now, this newer formula is available for all, and enduring minor side effects can forego later suffering and even death.

 

Nurse Lylia Middleton

“Presently we are giving one dose of the vaccine and it’s a lifelong protection with the vaccine.”

 

Shane Williams

“From your experience over the years that people have been dying, who could have prevented it by this vaccine?”

 

Nurse Lylia Middleton

“Yes. By my experiences. And we have seen that persons, especially the elderly, the younger population that because of this illness they have been admitted. They have stayed long days in the hospital or some people have even died. And even not even only in Belize in other parts of the world we have seen that people have died from these infections and they are preventable or it’s manageable with the vaccine.”

 

Shane Williams for News Five.