CDC advisers make their first childhood vaccine edit

[noumoe]

Vaccine advisers to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are meeting Thursday to reconsider a long-standing recommendation for allnewborns to receive the hepatitis B vaccine, in what could be the nation’s first major shift on routine childhood immunization under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Kennedy and his supporters have criticized the guidelines first issued in 1991 as overbroad and unnecessary because most children are not at risk for hepatitis B. Public health experts and researchers have credited broader vaccination for a 99 percent decline in acute infections among children, teens and young adults.

Hepatitis B can cause serious liver infections. In adults, the virus spreads in bodily fluids through sex or through sharing needles during injection-drug use. But the virus also can be passed to a baby from an infected mother, and as many as 90 percent of infected infants go on to have chronic infections, according to the CDC.

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