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Robert S. Baltimore, MD

JAMA. 1992;268(23):3366-3367.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

Provision of data useful for the development of a conjugate pneumococcal vaccine is the subject of two studies published in this issue of JAMA. Both Eskola et al¹ and the Israeli Pediatric Bacteremia and Meningitis Group² looked at the epidemiology of pneumococcal infections in children to discover the extent of disease, prevalent serotypes, and definition of a high-risk target population of children as preliminary steps in devising a conjugate pneumococcal vaccine strategy. Why is the current vaccine, which has worked well in adults, not used for children, and why go to the trouble of developing a conjugate vaccine?

It has been known for decades that the capsular polysaccharides of Streptococcus pneumoniae confer the antigenic specificity that defines different serotypes and that antibodies to these polysaccharides (also known as soluble-specific substances) are type-specific and protective for human beings. In 1945, MacLeod and associates³ showed that these polysaccharides, used . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

Author Affiliations
From the Departments of Pediatrics and Epidemiology and Public Health, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, Conn.

Footnotes
Reprints not available.

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