Clusters of meningococcal disease caused by a hyperinvasive lineage of Neisseria meningitidis, the ST11 complex, bearing a serogroup C polysaccharide capsule, have been prominent in Europe and North America since the early 1990s. This situation has led to expensive public health measures for outbreak control and, finally, to the introduction of a serogroup C glyconjugate vaccine into the primar...

Zinc depletion affects several facets of the immune system and the resistance to infections. We assessed the effect of zinc deprivation on the immune response to the pneumococcal polysaccharide antigens in the commercially available Pneumovax pneumococcal vaccine. Young female BALB/c mice were fed diets with 2.7, 5.8 or 25 micro g of elemental zinc per mg diet. After six weeks of pair feeding, ...

There is still a lack of effective vaccination strategies for patients with a deficient antibody response to bacterial polysaccharide antigens. In an open trial, we evaluated the immunogenicity and tolerance of a new 7-valent pneumococcal conjugate vaccine in 22 infection-prone nonresponders to pneumococcal polysaccharide vaccine and 21 controls. In the patient group, nonresponsiveness was conf...

Combined administration of a vaccine consisting of a small number (2 X 10(6)) of L1210 murine leukemic cells treated with glutaraldehyde and concanavalin A and a protein-bound polysaccharide preparation of Coriolus versicolor induced synergistic resistance to L1210 leukemia in BALB/c X DBA/2CrF1 mice. This effect was dependent on the dose and timing of the administration of the protein-bound po...

The pneumococcal polysaccharide vaccine is recommended as a means of preventing invasive disease in the elderly. We compared responses to the 23-valent polysaccharide vaccine in 46 previously unvaccinated, healthy, institutionalized elderly persons (mean age, 85.5 years) with those in 12 healthy younger adults (mean age, 37 years) by measuring prevaccination and postvaccination serum IgG antibo...

The immunogenicity and safety of two polysaccharides isolated from type III, group B Streptococcus, were tested in adults selected for existing low concentrations of natural antibody to the capsular polysaccharide of this organism. Both vaccine preparations (trichloroacetic acid and EDTA) were found to lack pyrogenicity and toxicity for experimental animals. A single 50-microgram subcutaneous i...

The present study assessed the effectiveness of the 23-valent pneumococcal polysaccharide vaccine to prevent pneumonia and death in older adults in a first-time report between January and December 2002. A prospective cohort study was conducted including all individuals>or=65 yrs of age assigned to one of eight primary care centres in Tarragona, Spain (n=11,241). The primary outcomes were commun...