Abstract

Dr. Basavanna P. L.*, Dr. Joicy James, Dr. Albin M. Antony and Dr. Joann Mary Jose

ABSTRACT

Background: A vaccine is a way to build our body’s natural immunity to a disease before one get sick. This keeps us from getting and spreading the disease. Vaccination is an injection or a procedure or a treatment with a vaccine to produce immunity against a disease, where they make the body stronger against a particular disease. Vaccinations are an important part of family and public health, vaccines prevent the spread of contagious, dangerous, and deadly diseases. Adverse events following immunization(AEFI) main role is to observe immunization safety, detect and respond to adverse events; correct unsafe immunization practices, reduce the negative impact of the health and contribute to the quality of immunization activities. Most of them are mild and do not last for long. Some of the serious adverse reactions to vaccines are serious allergic reactions, immune thrombolytic purpura, febrile seizures, etc., Among them common ones are febrile seizures, injection site reactions and allergic reactions. Objectives: The main objective was to identify and evaluate the adverse reactions following vaccination. Materials and Methods: A retrospective study in the pediatric department of Cheluvamba Hospital, Mysore Medical College and Research Institute, Mysore from over a period of 3 months. Data collected from 2017 January to 2019 December with a sample size of 115 cases. The data obtained was analyzed by using SPSS version 20. Result: Among 115 patients 72(62.3%) were male and 43 (37.4%) patients were female. In this study 75 (65.2%) patients were at age group 1month-1year. The most commonly reported AEFI is febrile seizures of about 37.4% (n=75). Adverse events were related to Pentavalent (47.8%) followed DPT (19.1%) vaccines. 7 deaths were reported followed by pentavalent vaccination. Conclusion: The study was conducted to identify and evaluate the most common Adverse events following immunization. In the modern era of science and technology, no child should suffer from a disease which can be prevented by a vaccine. So it is very important to provide vaccination awareness among the population. All the tertiary care centres should maintain detailed information’s about all vaccinated children and reports of adverse events associated with it, to overcome underreporting of AEFI.