Why do they stop doing tubaculosis jabs any more to children unless they have a background from a country with high

Question: Why do they stop doing tubaculosis jabs any more to children unless they have a background from a country with high levels of people which have TB, I have had the jab but surely in a couple of years it will come back and more people will have the Disease?
- Keywords:
  medicine,
  vaccine
Asked by flash18 to Lyn, Katy, Paul, PB, Ruth on 21 Jun 2013.
- Peter Balfe answered on 21 Jun 2013:
  
  TB cases have been quite low for years, but dropping the BCG vaccine might be very short sighted. The justification is that it’d be really easy to bring back if TB levels started to rise. I’m not too sure of that (just look at measles right now!)
- Ee Lyn Lim answered on 22 Jun 2013:
  
  One main reason is that the tuberculosis bacteria are evolving! That means even if you have had the jab you might still get TB, from a strain of ‘superbug’. So on the one hand, there’s not much point giving everyone a jab when it’s not going to do much, and on the other hand it’s never good to overuse vaccines (like antibiotics) if you’re not at high risk, because it might actually force the bacteria to evolve faster. If TB does start rising again, we’d probably have to use a better vaccine than the old BCG jab.
- Katy Brown answered on 25 Jun 2013:
  
  It really depends – sometimes if a disease is very rare its not worthwhile to keep vaccinating against it. It costs a lot of money to vaccinate everybody so its important to make sure the vaccines we give are the ones which offer the most protection against disease. I don’t know if it’s too early to stop vaccinating against TB though.
- Paul Waines answered on 25 Jun 2013:
  
  The main issue here is cost, but I’m not sure that just because numbers of cases are low at the moment, that this is a good enough reason to stop immunizing. The people that made the decide may well say that they are doing this to stop the TB bacterium from becoming resistant, but I’m not sure that this is a good enough argument…

Question: Why do they stop doing tubaculosis jabs any more to children unless they have a background from a country with high levels of people which have TB, I have had the jab but surely in a couple of years it will come back and more people will have the Disease?

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