Flu shot during pregnancy is safe, but flu isn’t
Illness in mother boosts risk of miscarriage or stillbirth
By Nathan Seppa
Getting the flu appears to nearly double a pregnant woman’s risk of having a miscarriage or stillbirth, data from Norway during the 2009-2010 global flu pandemic show. But getting vaccinated during pregnancy greatly reduces a woman’s risk of flu, researchers report online January 16 in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The study also finds that getting a flu shot during pregnancy is safe. Anecdotal reports had suggested that flu vaccination during gestation might have adverse effects on the fetus, but the new study — as well as two previous reports, from Canada and Denmark — now show no such connection.
“I think this is a strong finding,” says Lone Simonsen, an epidemiologist at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. “It’s good to see a carefully done, large study like this.”
Physician Camilla Stoltenberg of the Norwegian Institute of Public Health in Oslo and her colleagues scanned Norway’s national registry of medical information and identified more than 100,000 pregnancies during late 2009. Pregnant women who received the flu vaccine were one-third as likely to get the flu as were unvaccinated pregnant women.