Sanofi Pasteur Presents Safety Data on Menactra(R) Vaccine Given to Infants at Infectious Disease Socie...( PHILADELPHIA Nov. 2 /- Sanofi Paste...)

PHILADELPHIA, Nov. 2 /PRNewswire/ -- Sanofi Pasteur, the vaccines division of sanofi-aventis Group (EURONEXT: SAN and NYSE: SNY), presented Safety of a Quadrivalent (A,C,Y,W-135) Meningococcal Vaccine When Given to Infants with Other Pediatric Vaccines at the 47th Annual Meeting of the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) this past weekend. The annual meeting of physicians, scientists, and other health-care professionals who specialize in infectious diseases was held from October 29 through November 1 in Philadelphia, PA.

In the phase III, open-label, controlled, multicenter safety study, infants from the United States were enrolled to receive the quadrivalent, meningococcal conjugate vaccine (MCV4) at 9 months of age and then MCV4 concomitantly with the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine (MMRV), pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (PCV7), and a Hepatitis A (HepA) vaccine at 12 months of age. In the control group, 12-month-olds received only MMRV, PCV7, and HepA.

"The investigators concluded that the two-dose Menactra vaccine was generally well-tolerated by the infants in the study," said Miriam Pina, M.D., Sanofi Pasteur's clinical director who presented the data at IDSA. According to Pina, the most common side effects experienced in this study were minor and short-term, including injection site pain, redness, swelling and irritability.

About Menactra Vaccine

Menactra (Meningococcal [Groups A, C, Y and W-135] Polysaccharide Diphtheria Toxoid Conjugate Vaccine) is the only licensed conjugate vaccine in the U.S. for persons 2 through 55 years of age for active immunization against invasive meningococcal disease caused by N meningitidis serogroups A, C, Y, and W-135. Since it was first licensed in the U.S. by the Food & Drug Administration in 2005, more than 28 million
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