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US seeks child vaccine stockpile

Last Updated: 2003-01-27 10:00:34 -0400 (Reuters Health)

By Maggie Fox

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush plans to ask Congress for money to stockpile vaccines to cushion shortages like one that left hundreds of thousands of US children only partly protected from several diseases last year, health officials said late last week.

Bush's 2004 budget proposal will call for spending $707 million between 2003 and 2006 to build a stockpile of vaccines, the officials said. It will also include cash to pay for vaccines for under-insured children.

"We have recently gone through some serious vaccine shortages," Dr. Walter Orenstein, head of the National Immunization Program at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), told reporters. "We did not have, at the time, a vaccine stockpile to cushion the effect. This will allow us to build one over four years."

Last year's vaccine shortage forced 49 of the 50 US states to ration shots, the General Accounting Office said in a report in September.

The CDC recommends that all babies get 11 routine vaccines in eight shots. Over the past year, there was a shortage of five vaccines--the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine; the pneumococcal vaccine against bacterial meningitis; tetanus and diphtheria vaccines; and chickenpox. Many are not fully effective until a child has received several doses.

One problem was that some companies had trouble producing enough supplies. With five of the eight vaccinations made by one company each, this left the nation's supply highly vulnerable.

Orenstein said the stockpile would not solve all the problems. "It's only a 6-month supply so it doesn't cure the issue if a manufacturer leaves the market. But what it does do is help if there are production disruptions," he said.

WATCHING FOR DISEASE OUTBREAKS

The CDC has been watching to see if there are any outbreaks of disease caused by the shortage. "We don't have cases that we know of caused by the shortage to any great extent," Orenstein said. But he added that the CDC was checking on the cases of two children in Philadelphia who were reported to have severe meningitis.

The pneumococcal vaccine against bacterial meningitis is expensive, and while states pay for uninsured children to get it, they cannot always pay for under-insured children.

Meningitis, an inflammation of the brain and spinal cord, can cause brain damage, mental retardation, and death.

The Department of Health and Human Services said the new proposal to pay for under-insured children, which would cost $50 million, would aim to fill the gap.

Orenstein said Texas, Illinois, South Dakota and Kansas had not offered pneumococcal conjugate vaccine to under-insured children because of budget limits.

"Now children are covered if they come to a health department clinic if their health insurance doesn't cover vaccines," Orenstein said. "In the past they needed to find other federal funding sources, state funds, or, in the case of pneumococcal conjugate vaccines, they were sent away."

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