Background. We assessed the impact of 12 years of pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (PCV7) use on pneumococcal nasopharyngeal carriage and serotype-specific invasive disease potential among Native Americans.

Methods. Families were enrolled in a carriage study from 2006 to 2008; nasopharyngeal specimens and risk factor information were collected monthly for 7 visits. Pneumococcal carriage prevalence was compared with that before (1998–2000) and during (2001–2002) PCV7 introduction. We compared invasive disease incidence and carriage prevalence before and after PCV7 introduction to estimate changes in serotype-specific invasive potential.

Results. We enrolled 1077 subjects from 302 households. There was an absolute reduction in carriage prevalence of 8.0% (95% confidence interval [CI], 4.5%–11.4%) in children aged <5 years and 3.1% (95% CI, 1.1%–5.1%) in adults. In children aged <5 years, vaccine-serotype carriage prevalence decreased by 22.8% (95% CI, 20.1%–25.3%), and nonvaccine serotype (NVT) increased by 15.9% (95% CI, 12.4%–19.3%). No significant change was detected in serotype-specific invasive potential after PCV7 introduction.

Conclusions. Pneumococcal carriage prevalence decreased in all ages since PCV7 introduction; vaccine-serotype carriage has been nearly eliminated, whereas the prevalence of NVT carriage has increased. The increase in the NVT invasive disease rate seems to be proportional to the increase in colonization prevalence.

Restriction digest profiling of pneumococcal pbp2b-specific amplicons was effective for screening penicillin resistance. The pbp2b amplicon of all pneumococcal isolates for which the MICs of penicillin were ≤0.03 μg/ml had one of two different susceptible restriction profiles, and all 33 isolates for which MICs were 0.5 μg/ml or greater had one of seven distinct resistant profiles. Low-concentration penicillin resistance (MICs = 0.06 μg/ml to 0.25 μg/ml) was associated with sensitive HaeIII profiles in some isolates; however, RsaI profiling and pbp2b sequence analysis of such isolates revealed that some isolates contained low-level resistant pbp2b alleles, while others had susceptible pbp2b alleles. This data indicates that low-level penicillin resistance is sometimes conferred by determinants other than pbp2b.