Delaying the timing of vaccinating infants against hepatitis B — an idea a federal vaccine advisory group will likely vote on later this week — would neither improve the effectiveness of the vaccine nor make it safer to give to babies. But it would increase in the number of young children who become chronically infected with hepatitis B, an infection that carries a high risk a child will develop liver disease early in life, a report released Tuesday suggests.
A separate research effort, from modelers at several U.S. universities, attempted to quantify the impact of changing the policy. It suggested that delaying the start of vaccination by two months could lead to more than 1,400 babies becoming chronically infected with hepatitis B in the first year of the change, which could result in 304 cases of liver cancer and 482 hepatitis B-related deaths among those children as they aged. The modeling study is a preprint — research that has not yet gone through peer review.
