Question 7870 — health

Summary

Vaccination with BCG (Bacillus Calmette and Guérin) protects children against serious forms of tuberculosis – mainly tuberculous meningitis – and, to a lesser extent against pulmonary forms of this disease in children; its benefit in adults is less demonstrated. Vaccination was compulsory in our country for decades for all young children, then this obligation was suspended by decree 2017-111 of July 17, 2007. This suspension decision was based, and is still based, on a careful assessment of the benefit/risk ratio of this vaccination, which shows that below a certain threshold of tuberculosis incidence, BCG vaccination is no longer justified for all children. Collective expertise from the National Institute of Health and Medical Research, concurring opinions from the committee vaccination technique from the High Council for Public Health and modeling work from the Health Monitoring Institute (now the French Public Health Agency) were all in favor of lifting the vaccination obligation to replace it with a strong recommendation to vaccinate only the children most exposed to tuberculosis. The experts identified the geographic, economic or social criteria which define the children particularly at risk for whom vaccination remains recommended. This lifting of compulsory vaccination was accompanied by a significant strengthening of measures to combat tuberculosis in our country in order to best control the risks of transmission of the infection. In fact, there was no increase in severe forms in children, the incidence of the disease continued to decline steadily and tuberculosis is becoming increasingly rare in our country. To completely control this infectious disease, the Ministry of Health, the Regional Health Agencies and all practitioners are continuing and strengthening the actions of targeted screening, free treatment, prevention and surveillance carried out throughout the territory and targeted at the most vulnerable populations, in line with our international partners and notably the World Health Organization within the framework of the “strategy to end tuberculosis”.

Machine translation from French. The official text remains authoritative.

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