How Immunization Can Help Protect New Lives

it's unlike anything I've ever experienced it's so hard to describe feeling a baby kick is definitely one of the wildest Things to actually feel that movement inside of you and think wow I am carrying another whole life right now and that your body is providing everything that that person needs to grow and survive in the world [Music] and then as soon as they're out it's like okay I'm really a mom this is really my baby and we just made it through this crazy experience together it's a love like I've never known I always knew that I wanted to be a mom and have at least two children and so it's just been the center of my world ever since you being good as a labor and delivery nurse I knew group BP was something that we tested women for I knew it didn't seem super uncommon to be positive for it but I did not understand how detrimental it could be to a newborn until it happened to my son was it [Music] C everything was normal at first with my pregnancy with my delivery and it was the next day that he just became very fussy very irritable and it was that evening actually that he had his first seizure so he started having seizures over and over again so that was when they decided to airlift him to a hospital that has a NICU and it was roughly 12 hours after they drew his blood culture at our hospital that it was growing groupy STP I was initially confused because I had tested negative twice and so I that was not even on the list of things that I thought might be happening and might be causing him to have this episode and I kind of felt alone even with all my family there just because I thought well I've done this and now we don't know if he's going to survive this cuz at that point we weren't sure [Music] GBS is group be strap it's a bacteria and it's really common it actually lives on our bodies and about a third to sometimes more of the population is colonized at any given time and it doesn't cause harm in most people of course if you're very young particularly a newborn infant it can unfortunately enter the blood the bloodstream or even the brain and cause bad disease including blood infection and menitis or brain infections there was one instance when I was a practicing pediatrician working in the hospital Wards and a baby came in seizing and they took the baby to the MRI machine to look at the baby's brain and unfortunately there was extensive damage and the baby had been well just the day before the baby's mother had been screened for GBS disease and was actually negative at the time of pregnancy and when the baby came in the baby GBS positive and that's a really hard thing to tell the mother it's hard not to replay that in your head over and over again and think how could I have prevented this because ultimately I don't have any lasting effects from everything that happened but it's something that Colt's going to live with for the rest of his life that like when I was pregnant with Colt and we would think about what his life would be like we definitely thought like at this point at age five we thought we would have you know a kindergartener that was playing te- ball and talking and doing all of the things that you would think that a child this age would be doing he's still mostly non-verbal we had to realize he's going to have limitations and he's going to have things that he's going to require extra support with and that is from everything that happened in the beginning we're blessed that he's alive and we're blessed that he's doing as well as he is everything that he accomplishes is wonderful and we're so proud but also grieving what we thought he would be able to do as well I'm sorry mothers get exposed to different viruses or bacteria through the course of their life and their body Builds an immunity to it and remembers it and those memory antibodies get passed along to babies to protect them through the first months of life where their own body is not making antibodies so fizer's maternal immunization programs looks to capitalize on the antibodies that mothers could naturally develop from exposure to infections and make them even higher what we do with vaccines is that we can potentially boost antibodies and mothers and so when they pass that antibody through the placenta they're passing a massive load of antibody that potentially protects the baby through a longer period of time so that they don't get infection maternal is has been used for flu for Co for tetanus for pessis and now we're emerging into new areas to see if we can also protect other infant infections with maternal vaccination if you look at history the three things that had the biggest impact on global Health are clean water nutrition and vaccines I've been working on microorganisms now for about 30 years now I spend all of my time as head of vaccines research and development at viser early on when vaccines were first developed they were mainly made out of whole Cale pathogens over the years things have evolved and now we have other ways to make vaccines that provides more flexibility and also means that vaccines can be given to more people so when we develop vaccines we have three main tools within our tool boox that we use one is what we call a subunit vaccine one is an mRNA vaccine and the other is a polysaccharide conjugate vaccine all of them have the role of taking a piece of the pathogen that doesn't cause disease on its own as a template for our immune system to make the vaccine different pathogens require different approaches we identif ify what the right technology is for the pathogen that we're looking at we're really applying some of our new Innovative technology to help move these vaccines forward as a more rapid Pace with urgency so that we can help to prevent some of those severe diseases from happening today Colt is a goofball he's a Class Clown everybody thinks he's hysterical he loves to make people laugh and to laugh and be silly he's healthy and he's happy but he is going to have struggles and we're going to have to help him through those things I hope to hear him speak I can't wait until col can come up and tell me some of the things that are going on in his head he's got a great personality definitely and that's something that we're very thankful for because I know it could definitely have gone a very different way [Music]

Channel: Pfizer

Views: 35,148

Keywords: Pfizer

Id: 0_sz8wupUoA

Length: 8min 31sec (511 seconds)

Published: Wed May 15 2024