Vaccine bonuses

Vaccines have now been proven to help reduce antibiotic resistance. A recent report in Nature speaks of how vaccination against a pneumococcus strain has had an unexpected positive effect for subjects in Africa—besides imparting immunity against the pathogen, it also brought down the latter’s antibiotic resistance. In South Africa, the pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (PCV) against Streptococcus pneumoniae has brought down the overall incidence of pneumococcal diseases by two-thirds in both infants (the vaccinated group) and adults since its introduction. Researchers found that PCV reduced penicillin-resistance in the pathogen and surmise that this has made transmissions less virulent. This is the first time that such a trend has been reported from a developing country—between 1998 and 2008, vaccines were found to have caused a 64% decrease in penicillin-resistant pneumococci in children and a 45% fall in adults above 65 years of age in the US. The findings in South Africa bear incremental significance for developing nations,...