(Adnkronos) – “Enhanced flu vaccines, as per the ministerial circular for 2 years now, are extremely recommended for people who have an immune system that is no longer able to work at its best”. These are the over 65s, for whom adjuvanted and high-dose vaccines are recommended, but also all people who are not elderly but who suffer from a chronic disease. “Specifically, subjects with cardiovascular pathologies can have severe reactions due to a whole series of pathophysiological mechanisms triggered by the flu”. Thus Roberta Siliquini, president of Siti, Italian Society of Hygiene, Preventive Medicine and Public Health, on the occasion of the 57th National Congress of the scientific Society which recently took place in Palermo, comments on the results of the document born from Siti’s partnership with Siprec, the Italian Society for Cardiovascular Prevention, underlining that in these subjects, even if younger, but with an underlying pathology, vaccination is recommended.
“The Italian hygiene society and the Italian society for the prevention of cardiovascular pathologies – continues Siliquini – have worked together this year in a virtuous model which sees Siti collaborate with many other scientific societies to try to provide doctors, cardiologists and health workers a categorization of those fragile subjects suffering from cardiovascular pathologies who could “be better protected” with an enhanced vaccine.
It is a question of creating “paths that favor and facilitate the vaccination of fragile patients. We know that people with pathologies already live a lot within the National Health Service: hospital visits, specialist visits and so on. Imagining them approaching a vaccination service independently is difficult”, especially if one considers “the underlying fear of adding other drugs to therapies that are probably already important. It is therefore essential – observes President Siti – that clinicians sensitize the subject being treated to the fact that vaccination will not only not worsen their underlying pathology but, on the contrary, will be an aid in being able to continue treatment”, and “in the best of cases hypothesis, heal”. This is possible thanks to “collaboration with clinicians and with the various structures of the NHS: I imagine hospitals or clinics, polyclinics, locations where patients already go for basic pathologies”, which therefore become places where “to obtain vaccinations to which they are entitled.”
Speaking of appropriateness, “patients are not the same and not even “all vaccines are the same – specifies the expert – we are talking about vaccines that have different effects, different effectiveness on patients with different risks. We want to underline the importance of vaccination appropriateness: we want everyone to be able to have the vaccine that is most suitable for them.” How to do it? The two scientific societies have drawn up a guideline indicating the appropriate vaccines for the various age groups of patients suffering from cardiovascular pathologies, recommending however to refer to “clinical judgment based on the structure of the patient, their problems, their factors of risk and to identify the most appropriate vaccine for each patient”.
Caregivers, i.e. those who take care of these people, must also be added to the categories of patients at risk. “They must be immunized because we need to create – around fragile patients – a sort of ‘cocoon’ of protection – explains Siliquini – so that it is impossible for these patients to come into contact with the influenza virus, which is absolutely not trivial, as they say: in these patients it can cause serious effects linked to the fact that their immune system is compromised and therefore difficult to respond to an infectious insult adequately. On the other hand, these infectious pathologies”, such as the flu, “can aggravate – he concludes – the underlying ones”.
