Pneumococcus - VEC Vaccine Notes | Vaccine Education at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia

Charlotte Moser, Co-Director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, talks about pneumococcus and the vaccines that protect against it. She also addresses common questions and discusses the relative risks and benefits of the disease and vaccines.

Watch the episode to find out:

• What pneumococcus has taught us about prevention versus treatment
• How many people died from antibiotic resistance each year in the US
• How many people of 100 have pneumococcus in their nose and throat right now
• The different locations that pneumococcal infections can occur in the body
• What two factors are designed to work together to protect babies in the early months of life
• Why the elderly call this the “pneumonia vaccine,” but parents know it as the “ear infection vaccine” (and why the latter is only “kind of right”)
• How pneumococcus is an opportunist pathogen
• What the letters and numbers in the pneumococcal vaccine names mean
• Why PCV20 and PCV21 are more different than they may at first appear to be
• Why pneumococcal and influenza vaccines can be given to adults at the same visit, but why parents of young children may opt to separate the visits for these two vaccines
• Why smoking and drinking alcohol can increase the risk for this infection

To learn more about pneumococcus and the vaccine to prevent it, please visit http://bit.ly/pneumococcal-vax.

Questions? Submit the VEC Vaccine Notes form, https://bit.ly/contact-vec-vaccine-notes.

For other vaccines, diseases or general questions about vaccines, check out https://vaccine.chop.edu.

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