As opposed to 9 years or 11 years or whatever or did someone just decide that was a nice round number?
If you’re supposed to have one if you’re injured after 5 years, why not just have everyone get one every 5 years rather than making someone run to the doctor if they get injured in years 5-10? Or is this more a liability type thing rather than a medical need?
What kind of injuries would justify a tetanus shot in years 5-10? Obviously stepping on a nail (although I wasn’t offered one when I stepped on a nail in year 6 , instead I got antibiotics). A cat bite or scratch? Scraping your knee while cleaning up a sewage backup in your basement? Getting your belly button pierced?
Has anyone even bothered to figure out how long tetanus shots do last?
Last time I went in for stitches, after a rusty nail puncture wound, I mentioned that I thought it had been 10 years since my last tetanus jab, and was told, after they checked on the system, that I’d had enough tetanus injections and that current thinking said I should now have lifetime immunisation, and they didn’t give me one. Apparently that’s 5 vaccines, which would normally be before age 14, though I’m pretty sure I had one later than that.
That’s NHS standards in England, they’re quite possibly different in the US.
ETA: That page does say that they recommend a booster before travel to areas with a high tetanus risk and poor medical care availability, if your last vaccine was 10+ years ago, so there is that.
I was told that booster are recommended for those who work in higher risk areas. I rode horses at the time, so I got one. I would think Filbert would also count, but things change. Perhaps there’s simply a lower incidence in England?
“Mathematical analysis of the magnitude and decay rate of antitoxin antibody responses predicts that 95% of the adult population remain protected for ≥30 years after vaccination.”
The article suggests that earlier estimates of the duration of tetanus immunity following vaccination overstated the antibody titer needed for protection.
While we usually think of tetanus occurring in connection with penetrating wounds (like those inflicted by the classic “rusty nail”), tetanus infection occurs in other settings, including addicts who injected contaminated material (a 2006 study reported 23 cases in the U.K. over a one-year period, including two deaths). A classic Berton Roueche medical detection narrative involved an intrepid epidemiologist who tracked down a contaminated heroin batch involved in a fatal case.
Tetanus can be a very nasty disease. You do not want to do a Google image search for “opisthotonos”.
In the ER we would consider giving tetanus if a wound is very dirty (contaminated with blood, saliva, visible dirt, etc) if no booster within five years, even given more than 3 shots. Though this may be over cautious, the 2018 Up To Date (a great site) still recommends this.
I was once involved in treating a case of tetanus. We all hoped that we never saw anything like that ever again; it was an Amish person who had never been vaxed because s/he had never been in an environment (public school or an off-farm job) where it was required, and s/he had used herbal remedies to treat the wound, until…
The patient did recover but it was dreadful in the meantime, and so unnecessary.
Since I mentioned the Amish, most of the pertussis cases in that area also came from that population.