Annual report: surveillance of adverse events following immunisation in Australia, 2008

This report summarises Australian passive surveillance data for adverse events following immunisation (AEFI) reported to the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) for 2008, and describes reporting trends over the 9-year period 2000 to 2008. There were 1,542 AEFI records for vaccines administered in 2008. This was an annual AEFI reporting rate of 7.2 per 100,000 population, a 5% decrease compared with 2007. The majority of AEFI reports described non-serious events while 10% (n = 152) were classified as serious. Two deaths temporally associated with immunisation were reported; there was no evidence to suggest a causal association. The most commonly reported reactions were injection site reaction, allergic reaction, fever and headache. AEFI reporting rates in 2008 were 2.7 events per 100,000 administered doses of influenza vaccine for adults aged > or = 18 years, 18.9 per 100,000 administered doses of pneumococcal polysaccharide vaccine for those aged > or = 65 years, and 17.2 per 100,000 administered doses of scheduled vaccines for children aged < 7 years. Reports for infants increased in 2008, mainly related to gastrointestinal system events temporally associated with receipt of rotavirus vaccine in the 1st full year of the rotavirus immunisation program, while there was a substantial decrease in AEFI reports for human papilIoma virus vaccine in adolescents compared with 2007 when the program commenced. Increases in reports in children and adults were also partly attributed to the implementation of enhanced passive surveillance in Victoria. The consistently low reporting rate of serious AEFI highlights the safety of vaccines in Australia and illustrates the value of the national TGA database as a surveillance tool for monitoring AEFIs nationally.