[What to expect from vaccine prevention in acute respiratory tract infection in children?].

Acute respiratory tract infections are the main cause of morbidity and mortality in infants and young children. They are the first cause of hospitalisation in industrialised countries. A safe and efficient antiVRS vaccine would be a very important advance but, unfortunately, it does not exist at this moment. Recommendations of the influenza vaccine could be extended, as it is the case in USA, to decrease infants hospitalisations who are under one year of age and to decrease acute respiratory tract infections in children and adults. Theses vaccines are susceptible to play a role in coinfections and bacterial super infections. Haemophilus influenzae conjugate vaccine is very efficient against pneumonia due to this bacteria. Heptavalent pneumococcal conjugate vaccine decreases the number of otitis media and particularly recidivant and complicated otitis media. This vaccine decreases the number of pneumonia and hospitalizations for pneumonia in U.S.A. This vaccine acts on the carriage of pneumococcal strains and plays a role in decreasing antibiotic resistance. Epidemiological surveillance of pneumococcal strains is necessary because of a possible selection of strains due to the vaccine.