Question: What are the effects of pnumococcus?

Rebecca Gladstone answered on 20 Jun 2014:

Hi @11msaunders

Thanks for your question! The pneumococcus can live in your nose and cause you no harm at all, it is in the noses of about 30% of children under 5!
Some times, if the person has it up their nose and they have a weakened immune system or if the type pneumococcus is really good at causing disease then it can invade you body. It can do this by going down into the lungs and causing a chest infection and becoming pneumonia, it could also break through into the blood and cause blood posioning or septeciemia or in the worst cases it can invade the fluid that surrounds your spine and brain this is called meningitis.
These serious cases are quite rare but they happen to around 5000 people in the UK each year, it mostly affects the very young and the very old because their immune systems aren’t as strong.
We have a vaccine in the UK to prevent these cases, we vaccinate against the 13 types that are the best at causing disease, children under 5 are vaccinated routinely. The vaccine works very well and stops almost all cases of these 13 types! However new types are becoming more common and we need to design new vaccines.
One cool thing about the vaccine is that if you vaccinate enough people it stops it spreading between people as it doesn’t have anywhere to go if they are vaccinated. When spreading stops even people who are not vaccinated are less likely to get infected because they are not exposed to it anymore!