Mothering › Mothering Discussion Forums › Parenting › Ages and Stages › NICU & Preemie Parenting › Vaccinating older siblings to protect premie?
New Posts  All Forums:
 

Vaccinating older siblings to protect premie?

post #1 of 8
8/20/08 at 12:45pm
Thread Starter 
I'm 19 weeks pregnant with our third son and at high-risk to deliver prematurely. We have two older boys who will be about 2 and 4 when the baby is due.

My question is whether any of you have considered doing something different as far as vaccines for your older kids when you knew you had a premie on the way?

With our older son, we vaccinated him slowly and avoided several vaccines like chicken pox. With our younger son, we have barely started with vaccines. He was a premie and has been sick very frequently.

I will do everything I can to breastfeed our third son, but the older boys will be in school or daycare (church and the gym) 6-10 hours a week. Also, in our circle of friends there are many families that do not vaccinate so we can't count on herd immunity. If we were not having another child, I think I would not go back and vaccinate our younger son for the diseases that are mostly a big deal that first year. But knowing that we will have a little baby in the house this year, I'm wondering if we should go back and catch up.

We would also like to be able to spread out vaccines for the new baby, but that means we need to get through his first winter. Thoughts?
Sponsored Links
post #2 of 8
8/21/08 at 12:20pm
I'm not but my situation is a bit different in that my unvaxed child also has very little contact with anyone outside our immediate family. I'm not sure what I'd do if she were in daycare or just around lots of other people all the time. My older 2 are already vaccinated so I dont need to worry about them as much (although I never really trust vaxes-my ds was fully vaxed on schedule and has had pertussis twice, heh). My almost 3 year old is the only in our family not vaxed at all yet and we are still sticking to our original plan even though we have a preemie.
post #3 of 8
8/21/08 at 11:31pm
Hi,

None of my kids were vax'ed. My eldest was in kindergarten when my youngest came home from the NICU. My eldest caught quite a few colds and various other bugs and they ran their course through our family. I think my youngest even had RSV at one point BUT she had received the shot so it wasn't so bad. The biggest threat to my micro was having to take her to so many Drs. She ALWAYS caught infections from Drs offices

We homeschool now and we didn't get a single cold this past winter. I am happy w/my decision not to vax.
post #4 of 8
8/26/08 at 5:55pm
I'd encourage you to visit the vax forum and look up threads on herd immunity. The short answer is you wouldn't be able to count on it anyway for most vaxes. It basically only applies to the live virus vaxes like MMR and chicken pox. It does not apply to DTap, or inactivated polio. Here's a good article with more details.

We stopped vaxing 2 years ago, when our oldest was 2, and our second was 6 months. We don't plan to vax any of the kids any time soon. Technically, we consider ourselves selective and delayed vaxers, we just haven't selected any yet! But in answer to your question, no, having a preemie hasn't changed that for us.
post #5 of 8
9/1/08 at 3:01pm
Thread Starter 
It's time to make our plan. The 18 month check up is next week...

I think we'll go ahead and vaccinate our toddler for the things that could be the most dangerous to the baby, but wait on things that they are unlikely to catch and bring home. I think that means yes on DTaP, Rotavirus, Pc, HIB and the flu vaccine for this year. Since DS is 18 months and our time is limited, we'll probably do 2 at a time only when he's healthy so that he has at least 1 dose of each by October.

We'll see how that goes over the the new doc!

No for now on MMR, chicken pox, hep a and hep b.
post #6 of 8
9/1/08 at 4:02pm
DTap does NOT prevent carriage. It will not prevent your toddler from passing along pertussis to the baby. Please read the article I posted above.
post #7 of 8
9/4/08 at 4:54am
Thread Starter 
Our oldest had pertussis and it usually goes around here. This is one that we do vaccinate for...
post #8 of 8
9/4/08 at 5:04am
Quote:
My question is whether any of you have considered doing something different as far as vaccines for your older kids when you knew you had a premie on the way?
NO. Consider the fact that my DH was terminally ill with cancer - I was warned by the oncologists to keep recently vaccinated children away from him since his immune system was so weak and compromised that he could catch something from a child who just recently had been inoculated with a live vaccine (MMR and the flu), and could pass it on to him and hasten his demise.

Recently vaxed children are the carriers, not unvaxed children.

This is one of many incidents that made me very happy that I never vaxed my children; I am glad my DH agreed with me.
New Posts  All Forums:
 
  Return Home
  Back to Forum: NICU & Preemie Parenting
Mothering › Mothering Discussion Forums › Parenting › Ages and Stages › NICU & Preemie Parenting › Vaccinating older siblings to protect premie?