Vaccination efficacy and environmental pollution: Environmental Influences on the Immune System

This chapter focuses on the limited number of environmental pollutants for which such vaccination data exists, including polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and perfluorinated alkylate substances (PFAS), which are described individually. In general, elevated exposures to these compounds were associated with reduced humoral immune response to routine childhood immunizations. The prenatal and early postnatal exposure to PCB were most immunotoxic, possible through toxicity toward the developing immune system of young infants, while the contemporary exposure to PFAS reduces the antibody levels in a more direct manner. The presented results in this chapter might explain some of the wide variation in antibody responses to immunization and support the hypothesis that some people today could be immunocompromised because of their exposure to environmental pollutants. Due to their high persistence, PCBs and PFAS will remain widespread in the environment, but the presented evidence of immunotoxicity indicates that human exposure to these chemicals should be limited to protect the human immune system throughout its lifetime.