All smokers (age 19 and up) should receive the pneumococcal vaccine, advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). New findings show that smokers are at increased risk of developing pneumonia. In fact, more than half of all adults who get pneumonia are current or former smokers. Each year, pneumonia claims over 58,000 lives. Many of these could be prevented by getting the pneumonia vaccination.
Smoking makes you more susceptible to pneumococcal infection and dampens the immune response systemically and in the lungs. Researchers also found that the risk of pneumonia decreases when a person stops smoking, cutting the increased risk by 50 percent after stopping for 5 years, and a return close to nonsmoker's risk after 10 years of stopping.
After studying the risk of the pneumonia vaccine, CDC report that there is no increased risk of serious adverse events associated with the vaccine.
References:
Journal of the American Medical Association. 2008;300:2713. |
