Strengths of this study included systematic recruitment and sample collection from a TSA HDAC community
cohort with medically attended acute respiratory illness, use of a highly sensitive and specific RT-PCR assay, access to a validated immunization registry, and complete capture of hospital admissions from the electronic medical record. However, several limitations should be acknowledged. First, hospitalization due to influenza is rare in healthy adult populations. Despite eight seasons, there were few hospitalizations in our study, all of which were from a single hospital in central Wisconsin. Second, antigenic characterization was not performed for many positive samples, and minor antigenic drift can be difficult to detect and interpret. As a result, we were not able to assess the potential impact of antigenic variability. The 2007–08 season accounted for the majority of A (H3N2) infections, and during that year there was circulation of A/Brisbane/10/2007-like
viruses that were minor antigenic variants from the vaccine strain [26]. Third, our classification of high risk medical conditions was based on ICD-9 diagnosis codes without medical record validation. However, all diagnoses were entered by physicians and automatically mapped to ICD-9 codes in the electronic medical record, which reduced the potential for coding error. Finally, our study population included primarily outpatient influenza cases and there may have been differential health care seeking behavior between vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals. We cannot exclude the possibility that vaccinated individuals had milder influenza illness and did
Paclitaxel supplier not seek medical attention. In that scenario, vaccination would have reduced illness severity, leading to fewer outpatient Thiamine-diphosphate kinase visits and hospitalizations, but this would not be evident when comparing the risk of hospitalization in vaccinated and unvaccinated outpatients. However, we note that estimates of vaccine effectiveness in the outpatient setting are generally similar to estimates of efficacy based on randomized clinical trials, and the primary endpoint for clinical trials is influenza illness rather than severity. Because of these limitations, results should be interpreted with caution. Hospitalization is an important complication of influenza infection from a public health and an economic perspective. Available evidence suggests that influenza vaccine provides moderate protection against influenza-related hospitalization. Further research is warranted to assess the impact of vaccination in preventing severe outcomes among vaccine failures, including differences by type, subtype, and lineage. We thank the following individuals for their contribution to this work: Burney Kieke, Sarah Kopitzke, Pam Squires, Jim Donahue, Stephanie Irving, David Shay, and Alicia Fry. Conflicts of interest: HQM, JKM, and EAB receive research funding from MedImmune, LLC.
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