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What you should know about
the various types of vaccines
Travellers especially should take precautions and, depending on their destinations, go for the relevant vaccinations
I
Dr Chong
Yeh Woei
Senior Physician
(Internal Medicine)
Singapore Medical
Specialists Centre
MBBS (Singapore),
MRCP (UK) (Internal
Medicine)
50
MAY 2020
AM often asked about vaccines by my patients; most
of the queries pertain to travel, dengue, pneumonia and
shingles.
It is interesting to note that most of our childhood
vaccines are not compulsory under our laws in Singapore.
I had always assumed that vaccines like BCG, polio,
hepatitis B, pertussis (whooping cough) are mandatory
but only diphtheria and measles are compulsory by law.
I believe most parents in Singapore are very compliant
with the National Childhood Immunisation Schedule.
In fact, childhood vaccinations have a long history in
Singapore. Most people don’t realise that Singapore was
one of the first nations in the world to start mass polio
vaccination in 1958. We were also one of the first nations
to start a mass hepatitis B vaccination programme for all
newborns in 1987. As a result, we have managed to cut
transmission of Hepatitis B from mother to child by 80 per
cent or more.
Some of the vaccines are not in the National
Immunisation schedule and I am often asked about them.
The rotavirus vaccine is for diarrhoea in infants and it
is an oral vaccine so there is ease of administering the
vaccine. The cost maybe a little daunting though. The
chickenpox vaccine is also useful as chickenpox scars
can be quite traumatic for teenagers and everyone does
not realise that as an adult, getting shingles is no laughing
matter.
I am often also asked about the vaccine for cancer
of the cervix for young girls. This vaccine is now
recommended in the National Schedule. I encourage my
patients to send their young daughters for the vaccine
as that would prevent cancer of the cervix. The best
age would be before they become sexually active; the
recommended age would be from 9 years of age onwards.
Another vaccine that is quite unusual in the local
context – except for people going for the Haj – is the
meningitis vaccine. Most of the time, I am asked about this
by parents when their child is going to university abroad
especially in Europe, USA or Australia/New Zealand. The
usual vaccine is called MenAWCY that protects against
four strains or serogroups of bacteria identified by the
letters.
Increasingly I am also asked by concerned parents
about the meningitis B vaccine. At the moment on the
CDC Atlanta website, there are three universities in the
US that have outbreaks of meningitis B. Apparently
there are quite sizeable populations in Western countries
carrying the meningitis B strain especially in the varsity
age groups. Approximately half of the meningitis cases in
the Western world are now caused by this strain.
GlobalHealthAndTravel.com
A vial of the measles, mumps, and rubella virus (MMR) vaccine. There has been a drop in the coverage of the MMR vaccine in the US and
UK with a rise in measles cases worldwide.