New prevention measures for RSV, a respiratory virus that can be especially harmful to babies, became widely available this past winter. The new measures include a vaccine given in pregnancy and antibodies given to newborns, and they led to a major drop in RSV hospitalizations among infants, according to a new CDC study.
RSV researchers are pretty excited about how well the new interventions have worked.
Dr. Natasha Halasa, a professor of pediatrics at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, calls it “very, very good news.”
“This is, like, it’s so exciting in the RSV world because for years we’ve been saying it’s the most common cause of hospitalization,” she said.
Now though, the number of infant hospitalizations is on the decline, said Halasa — especially for the youngest patients, who often cost more to treat.
“The highest reduction was in infants that were zero to two months,” Halasa said.
Keeping babies healthy is obviously a win for families. But it’s also “a win for the American taxpayer,” said Angela Bengtson, a professor of epidemiology at Emory University.
That’s because 61% of infant hospitalizations for RSV are paid for by Medicaid, collectively costing more than $350 million a year. And Bengtson said the RSV interventions are still so new, only about two-thirds of eligible infants got them last year.
“Think of how much more we might be able to reduce if we increase coverage overall,” Bengtson said.
There are some harder-to-measure costs of RSV that could be addressed too, said Vanderbilt’s Halasa.
“It's also important to think about the indirect effects, right?” she said. “Parents have to take off work.”
And, she added, infants who get severe RSV are at higher risk of developing asthma later on.
All of this leads Donald Shepard, a health economist at Brandeis University, to say that “vaccines are not only one of the best public health tools, but also one of the most cost-effective ones.”
Shepard added that RSV isn’t a major cause of infant mortality in the U.S., due to strong health care. But the new prevention measures elsewhere in the world, “besides being important economic value, it's a lifesaving tool,” he said.
Vaccines for things like measles and polio have almost eliminated health care costs associated with those diseases, Shepard said. He hopes RSV prevention could pay similar dividends.
