Prioritize Pregnant Women to Get Swine Flu Shot, E...(fter falling into a coma. Her healthy ba...),Health

Why does pregnancy put women at special flu risk? Emory University's Dr. Kevin Ault told the Associated Press that pregnancy causes changes to women's respiratory and immune systems that may make it more difficult for them to rid themselves of influenza infection. And the World Health organization recently stated that pregnant women may be "at increased risk for severe disease, potentially resulting in spontaneous abortion and/or death, especially during the second and third trimesters of pregnancy."

The risk of H1N1 during pregnancy has even led some health officials in Britain and Switzerland to advise that women consider delaying pregnancy during an H1N1 outbreak. No such call has come from U.S. health officials, however.

There's also the issue of whether a flu shot might confer some protection to newborns, who have relatively undeveloped immune systems. A study published recently in the New England Journal of Medicine found just such a transfer of protection among a group of Bangladeshi women and their offspring who received the seasonal flu vaccine.

Dr. Marc Siegel, an associate professor of medicine at New York University Langone Medical Center in New York City, agreed that pregnant woman should be of special concern. "Pregnant women are semi-immunocompromised, they are a target population for any infection," he said. "It is not surprising that they are at risk of flu, any flu."

In addition, today's pregnant women are younger than women born before 1957, who appear to have some immunity to the new H1N1 swine flu, Siegel said. "I put pregnant women up near the top of the list of those who should get the H1N1 vaccine," he said.

Women should not be afraid of being vaccinated against the H1N1 flu, he added. "Any fear of vaccines is greatly outweighed by the benefit of being inoculated against an emerging virus," he
'/>"/>