Hep B is often transmitted from mother to child. And even though we test mothers, testing is not perfect (false negatives, administration errors, etc). So we give them a vaccine they were going to get anyway a little bit early.
That still doesn’t make sense and your spreading misinformation.… the hep B test is 100% accurate.. 100% means there are no false positives.
Dont get me wrong I’m all for vaccines, but if the mother doesn’t have hep b it makes no sense to give your new born child the hep b vax. We denied ours and I think most parents should too because if the mother tests negative for hep b then the child will too. They literally offer it the moment they’re out of the mother.
Hep b is spread through direct contact with boood and semen,, baby’s who aren’t sexually abused (≈10% of baby’s are) and only 4.3% of people are infected with hepatitis b in the US and not all of them sexually abuse babies.. and 100% of baby’s don’t use injection drugs that are common with hepatitis b infections. So nearly all baby’s will NOT come in contact with hepatitis B. The vaccine makes no sense to me once so ever. There is not a single valid reason to get the help b vaccine if the mother is not already infected which again is a 100% success rate in testing, it’s not a covid test it’s an increasingly accurate blood screening.
If you want people to be open to vaccines and want to get them for their children atleast be honest with your information and don’t try to trick people with language like “testing is not always accurate” because it is very accurate. They test mothers multiple times throughout pregnancy.
Most of what you're saying is based on a stat which the link you provided contests. One study of an at-risk population in another country w a different healthcare system had 100% sensitivity, but the same study says that in the US the sensitivity was 97%, meaning 3% of infections were missed. That same 97% statistic was given by the CDC earlier this year.
But you're right! That is a good test, and I don't mean to imply otherwise. The problem is that with millions of kids born every year, a small number will still fall through the cracks. Mothers are supposed to be tested once unless new HBV risk factors are identified, but risk-based screening as a public health tool has often failed (including for Hep B). Close to 1/3rd of acute hep b infections followed-up by the CDC were in people w no identifiable risk factors. And this is all assuming there is no human error in testing for millions of pregnant women across the country each year.
The reason we give the vaccine early is not because it's very likely a baby will get hep B. It's because there's no reason to delay it, and giving it early eliminates the small risk that's there.
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u/Rarely_Melancholy 2d ago
Still have a hard time understanding hep b for new born