Two vaccines known as Fluria and Fluzone have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration to be used on infants who are six months and older. No vaccine has yet been approved for use on infants who are younger than six months. As with the adults, the infant flu shot is also known to be associated with side effects and hence, this must be taken into care while scheduling your baby for vaccination.
For the infants, it is highly recommended that the flu shot be administered on the front, outside of the thigh. Injection site reaction conducted for clinical studies on Afluria has actually found to be less common in the younger children than in the older ones. For children in the age group of six months to three years, pain, redness and swelling was observed in 37, 38 and 21 percent respectively. Redness and swelling are the obvious symptoms while pain in infants is difficult to identify and is often confused with fussiness and irritability. In children, flu shots are often accompanied with flu-like illness wherein which the symptoms are usually found to be mild and brief than compared to the symptoms of the illness. For Afluria, frequent symptoms in children have also been noted to be runny nose, irritability, cough, loss of appetite, fever, etc. One of the recognized complication from the flu shot is the life-threatening allergic reaction known as anaphylaxis which mainly results due to the second exposure to an allergen and as infants usually receive two flu shots, the occurrence of anaphylaxis is usually characterized with the second injection.
Acute Disseminated Encephalomyelities (ADE) is a very severe but rare reaction to that of the flu shot which is usually characterized with abrupt onset of fever, muscle weakness, increased or decreased reflexes, vision changes and impaired balance. Fever due to ADE might last only for a few weeks but the neurological deficits caused by this may last for months or even years. However, occurrence of ADE is very rare and is mainly believed to occur due to the interaction of the flu shot and a person’s immune system.
