United States: The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on September 20 approved the first-ever vaccine manufactured for adults against the flu with a nasal spray.
It can be taken by themselves or via caregivers. The same nasal spray under the name FluMist, has been approved since 2003, but it was to be administered with the help of a pharmacist or other health care provider only.
About FluMist
The nasal spray vaccine, which has been around for twenty years, administered by pharmacists or health care providers for those people who belong to the age bracket of 5 to 49 years.
Further, the approval was ramped up in children, including those younger ones of up to two years of age, in 2007. Now, FluMist comes in a single-dose sprayer, where half of the dose is to be sprayed into each nostril, Yahoo Life reported.
How is nasal spray different than an injection?
Apart from being given as a nasal spray rather than as an injection, FluMist also varies from flu shot in that it contains live-attenuated flu virus.
This means it carries a version of the virus, which is weak but alive. However, in flu shits, it contains dead or inactive viruses.
Furthermore, as per the reports, a self-administered version of the vaccine has been in place for a long time. The FDA has said that it will be broadly available for the next flu season by the beginning of 2025.
According to Dr. Davey Smith, chief of infectious diseases and global public health at the University of California, San Diego, “I’m really hoping that we can get more people vaccinated [with FluMist approved for home use], including children and people who have needle aversions,” Yahoo Life reported.
Moreover, as per Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia’s Vaccine Education Center, while talking about the composition of the nasal spray, where a weakened version of the virus is present, is “cold-temperature-adapted, so it reproduces itself in the nose, which is cooler than the core body temperature.”
Offit added, “But it doesn’t reproduce itself in the lungs,” where it would cause infection.