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The fact that some Indigenous children in rural regions of Australia have to wear hearing aids when they start school because of chronic severe ear infections was one of the reasons that drove Vinay Menon to choose his research topic for his Bachelor of Medical Science degree.

It was also his passion for public health and interest in vaccines as an important public health measure that led him to join the Vaccine Trials Group in the School of Paediatrics and Child Health, which is researching otitis media in young children.

“Otitis media affects a lot of children, especially in remote communities where they will have almost universal disease quite early on,” Mr Menon said.

Previous research shows that Australian non-Indigenous children have an average of three months of ear infections in their life whereas Indigenous children have an average of 2.5 years of infections.

In the study with Associate Professor Peter Richmond’s group, the researchers looked at the difference between children who have a large number of otitis media or middle ear infections at an early age and those who have very few or no episodes. Mr Menon said some children had six or more episodes by the age of one or two.

While the study was conducted with children in metropolitan Perth, the group hopes the study findings can be applied to the most vulnerable children in remote communities.

“We are developing better and better vaccines against the pneumococcus, which is the most common cause of ear infections,” Mr Menon said. “We know a lot about the children who are more prone to infections but we wanted to know if there is an immune problem and whether they are having problems developing antibodies against the bacteria because if they are, it means that future vaccines are not going to be as helpful as we had hoped.”

Basically, if their immune response to the current vaccines was impaired, it would mean that immunisation with future improved vaccines would not be effective.

But the findings to date are that the children with many ear infections are responding normally to the vaccines and the bacteria and do not have an impaired immune system.

“So it looks like these children are probably vulnerable because they have greater exposure to the bacteria and this may be related to many other issues like overcrowding, daycare attendance, allergy and hygiene,” Mr Menon said.

The finding that the higher rates of infection did not appear to be linked to an impaired immune system was “really good news” for future vaccine development, he said. However, a lot more research was needed to detect more subtle immune problems in these children and he hoped to be involved in the Vaccine Trials Group’s ongoing research in the area, he said.