Commonly used pneumococcal polysaccharide vaccines do not appear to be effective for preventing pneumonia, found a study by a team of researchers from Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

Pneumococcal disease, one of the world's leading causes of death and serious illness, must be recognised as an urgent global health issue together with HIV, malaria and TB, say the UK All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Pneumococcal Disease Prevention in the Developing World in a report launching at the House of Lords today.

In 2006, a pneumococcal vaccine (Prevenar®) was introduced in the childhood vaccination programme in Norway. Two years later, the experiences have been published in the journal Vaccine. The results show a strong decline in serious pneumococcal infections among young children.

Although the childhood pneumococcal conjugate vaccine has been a boon in reducing the incidence invasive pneumococcal disease (IPD), the public and the medical community must not get complacent, as non-vaccine strains, some resistant to antibiotics, are on the rise, say scientists at a meeting today in Boston.

Since the approval of a vaccine against pneumococcal bacteria for young children in 2000, rates of invasive pneumococcal disease (IPD) are down significantly in all age groups, while rates of IPD caused by non-vaccine strains are modestly on the rise. Researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report their results today (March 18) at the 2008 International Conference on Emerging Infectious Diseases in Atlanta, Georgia.

Among patients hospitalized with community-acquired pneumonia, those who had previously received the pneumococcal vaccine had a lower risk of death and admission to the intensive care unit than patients who were not vaccinated, according to a report in the Oct. 8 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

A vaccine has been shown to help reduce the number of infants and toddlers developing frequent ear infections, according to new research from Katherine A. Poehling, M.D., a pediatrician at Brenner Children's Hospital, part of Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center. Results from her study are published in the April issue of Pediatrics.