Public health officials in Mane say they're worried that a federal advisory committee will recommend that the Hepatitis B vaccine not be given to children under the age of four.
Maine CDC director Dr. Puthiery Va says decades of evidence shows that the current strategy of giving the vaccine to newborns is safe and effective.
Va says before the early 1990s, immunization efforts focused on groups considered at highest risk, which didn't significantly lower infection rates.
"And that's what was missing before, is we were targeting people based on risk factors but we weren't going upstream," Va says. "But with this birth dose in the series of the Hepatitis B vaccine, what we did instead is we went way upstream and interrupted a critical transmission route."
That resulted in a 99% drop of acute Hepatitis B cases in children and teens from 1990-2019.
Hepatitis B is a liver disease. It's transmitted by body fluids, which can happen through syringe drug use, sexual contact, during pregnancy and birth, and by sharing personal items such as toothbrushes or towels with an infected person.
