Various aspects of adult immunisation were discussed at the launch of an adult immunisation centre at Belle Vue Clinic in south-central Kolkata on Friday.
Doctors said with age, people become more susceptible to serious diseases caused by pneumonia and flu among others, resulting in morbidity and even mortality.
Immunity can begin to fade over time and immunisation offers the right protective shield, they said.
Adult immunisation serves two purposes — prevents the occurrence of certain diseases and reduces medical expenses, simultaneously minimising the disease load and decreasing the overall cost involved, said doctors.
“Regardless of age, people need immunisation to keep themselves healthier. Over the last few years, changes in lifestyle and chronic co-morbidity across the world challenged our natural immune system and resulted in increased hospitalization and mortality rates, involving infections in adults and the elderly,” said Sourabh Kole, critical care expert, Belle Vue Clinic, and founder-president, Indian Society for Adult Immunization.
“Everybody over 50 years should consider taking pneumococcal and influenza vaccines, especially people with respiratory problems,” he said.
The centre at Belle Vue will provide adults with vaccines for pneumonia, hepatitis A and B, meningitis, varicella, rabies, inactivated poliovirus (IPV), measles, mumps, rubella (MMR), human papillomavirus infection (HPV), tetanus, diphtheria, cancer and influenza.
The adult immunisation clinic at Belle Vue will have a team of experts guiding recipients on the details of each vaccine — the age limit, dosage and other information.
For now, the clinic will be open on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, said an official of the hospital.
Adult immunisation has assumed greater significance in the post-Covid world, the doctors said.
“We believe that prevention is better than cure and the Covid-19 pandemic has taught us this,” said Pradeep Tondon, CEO, Belle Vue Clinic.
Chandramouli Bhattacharya, infectious disease expert at Peerless Hospital, said adult vaccination can be broadly classified as age-related and disease-related.
“For example, everyone above 65, irrespective of their ailments, should receive pneumococcal and influenza vaccines. These two are the commonest vaccines provided to adults. The same vaccines should also be given to people below 65 with respiratory and cardiac problems and low levels of immunity,” he said.
He spoke of another adult vaccine with not much uptake in India — the vaccine for herpes zoster, a reactivation of the chicken pox virus in the body, causing painful rashes and blisters.
Once infected with chicken pox, the varicella zoster virus does not leave our body. It remains hidden in a nerve. With growing age or any other mode of immuno-suppression, the chances of reactivation go up. The reactivation causes herpes zoster, which is intensely painful and also risky in advanced stages.