Posts tagged vaccine

Thanks to a new bill currently going through New Jersey legislature, employees working at health care facilities such as general or special hospitals, nursing homes, or home health care agencies may be ‘mandatorily’ required to receive the flu vaccine. The bill, recently approved by the Assembly Health and Senior Services Committee, may be voted on this week.

Needless to say, this bill is not the first to call for mandatory flu vaccines. Previously, a federal advisory committee has called on hospitals and healthcare clinics to make the seasonal flu shot mandatory for all employees. What the advisory committee fails to mention is that there is a shocking lack of evidence supporting the effectiveness of the flu vaccine — especially regarding certain healthcare workers in particular. The Cochrane Database Review, the gold standard within the evidence-based medical model for deciding the potency of common medical interventions, does not lend clear scientific support to the theory that flu vaccines are safe or effective.

It is unfortunate to see such a practice pushed so hard on individuals, as the flu vaccine has a rather concerning history. In 2010, government health chiefs confirmed a link between the H1N1-containing seasonal flu vaccination and the killer nerve disease known as Guillain-Barre Syndrome. But this information didn’t stop health officials from pushing the vaccine onto the population in 2010 and 2011.

The link between Guillain-Barre Syndrome and the flu vaccine has been confirmed by studies, anecdotal evidence, and even the vaccine insert itself. The insert, detailing information about the Influenza A Monovalent Vaccine, details risks far beyond Guillain-Barre Syndrome. For all of the details you can read the insert yourself in PDF form.

Luckily, those realizing that the immune system is the key to prevent sickness won’t fall for the hard-sell of vaccinations. Instead of receiving a flu vaccine, try supplementing with vitamin D, which is 800 percent more effective than vaccines at preventing the flu according to numeric figures from research that appears in the March, 2010 issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Avoiding sugars, de-stressing the brain, and exercising are also great ways to reduce your chances of contracting a cold or the flu.

If you already fell into the trap of receiving the 1 percent effective flu vaccine, don’t worry. There are measures you can take before and after receiving a vaccine to help block the immune response and therefore protect yourself from vaccine damage.

The end of last year was masked with sadness for Belgium parents Raphaël Sirjacobs & Béatrice Dupont, as their nine week old daughter Stacy Sirjacobs lost her fight for life. Stacy died just one week after her first vaccinations and left her twin sister Lesly behind. Devastated by their loss their parents are convinced that vaccines and hospital failures were the cause of their beautiful daughters death.

Stacy and Lesly were born one month premature by Caesarean section and spent the next four days in an incubator. Stacy needed resuscitation at birth.

Following medical advice parents Sirjacobs and Dupont decided to have the twins vaccinated. Stacy was slightly unwell with a cold on the day of her vaccinations but doctors assured her parents that it was safe to give her the vaccinations.

(It is worth noting that there is a history of Sudden Infant Death and allergies in the family. The twins were being prescribed a milk supplement due to a milk allergy at the time Stacy became ill)

The twins received Prevenar, a vaccine against meningitis and pneumonia, Infanrix Hexa, a six in one vaccination for diphtheria, tetanus, polio, pertussis, hepatitis B and Haemophilus type B, and finally the Rotarix, a preventive vaccine for gastroenteritis.

This means that these tiny vulnerable babies received a staggering nine vaccines in one day, vaccines that may have caused one of them to die.

A week after her vaccinations Stacy became unwell with a fever of 39.9 degrees C. Her parents decided to administer Perdolan to lower her fever. As their daughter was still very poorly they called the hospital who advised them to bring their daughter in.

The medical staff diagnosed Stacy with a slight chest infection and infection in her blood and told her parents not to worry as this was “not serious”. Stacy was then given medication and put on a drip feed and kept in for observation.

Stacy’s father informed me that all links to the vaccines were strongly denied.

Full Story Here:

In letters to Colorado public health officials, the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) opposes a rule requiring workers in health care facilities to have an annual influenza vaccination or lose their jobs. Workers who had a rare religious or medical exemption would be required to wear a mask in patient care areas from November through March.

The religious exemption is too narrowly drawn, AAPS writes, and should be a philosophical exemption, as accepted in many states, to “to avoid inquisitions into matters of faith.” The mask requirement “seems to be nothing more than a punitive retaliation against those who decline the vaccine” and should be dropped, the AAPS letter states, as both immunized and nonimmunized individuals can transmit influenza or other illnesses.

The New Mexico study cited in support of the policy shows a tiny effect: an adjusted odds ratio of only 0.97 for confirmed influenza “outbreaks” (at least one case) in residents of long-term care facilities where 60% of direct-care workers were immunized compared with facilities with a 51% immunization rate. This means that in facilities where more workers were immunized, residents were still 97% as likely to get influenza. “Many other factors could account for the small difference,” states AAPS executive director Jane Orient, M.D.

In the age of “evidence-based medicine,” AAPS notes that there is surprisingly little evidence supporting the efficacy of influenza vaccine, and evidence of safety is also limited. According to a 2006 article in the British Medical Journal by Tom Jefferson http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1626345/, the coordinator of the vaccines section of the Cochrane Collaboration, safety data are reported in only five randomized studies with 2,963 observations. Many repeated doses of similar vaccines likely increase the risk of allergic reactions, and no data exist on the safety of a large number of doses, states Dr. Orient, citing a 2006 article in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons. http://www.jpands.org/vol11no3/geier.pdf

Immunizations and pertinent information should be made conveniently available to all workers in medical facilities, states AAPS. But the judgment of medical professionals should be respected; more than half choose to decline the annual shot.

Click here to read the letter to Colorado officials.

For almost two years, an infant school pupil has found himself losing muscle control and falling asleep at a moment’s notice due to a rare sleeping illness.

Six-year-old Josh Hadfield, from Frome in Somerset, had shown no symptoms of narcolepsy prior to February 2010, and it took another year for doctors to diagnose the condition.

Josh’s mother, Caroline, fears it could be linked to a swine flu vaccine called Pandemrix which he received three weeks before showing symptoms.

Tests in the UK have not revealed a link between Pandemrix and narcolepsy, although the Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Agency said “a similar risk had only been confirmed in Finland and Sweden”.

‘Dropping forward’

Mrs Hadfield said her son “became a different boy” soon after receiving the vaccination, and Josh was also found to have cataplexy which makes his muscles collapse whenever he laughs.

She said: “Initially, I put it down to being the end of term, coming up to half-term week.

“He was tired and then he started losing muscle control so he couldn’t hold things properly.

“He needed you to support his hand because it was just dropping forward. It was horrible.”

In Finland, investigators found 79 vaccinated children and adolescents had developed narcolepsy, 12 times more than they would expect.

The Finnish government said it accepted a link between Pandemrix and narcolepsy and has promised compensation and support for affected families.

Health Minister Paula Risikko said: “We have decided to take these measures because the decision to acquire the vaccine was ours under the threat of a pandemic, and therefore we want to take the responsibility for the outcome.”

‘Genetic link’

The vaccine is manufactured by GlaxoSmithKline, whose UK medical director Dr Pim Kon said: “There is currently no evidence at all to suggest there is a causal link between Pandemrix and narcolepsy.

“We are working very hard with the regulatory authorities to try to understand what is happening.

“At the end of day, patient safety is of utmost importance to us and we wouldn’t ever put out a drug or leave it out there if we believed that it actually was a true issue.”

The European Medicines Agency said in July studies had shown a six to 13-fold increased risk of narcolepsy in children and adolescents vaccinated with Pandemrix compared with unvaccinated children.

But it added there appeared to be a link but the vaccine “is likely to have interacted with genetic or environmental factors which might raise the risk of narcolepsy, and that other factors may have contributed to the results”.

And despite six million doses being administered, only seven children have been reported to have developed narcolepsy after taking Pandemrix in the UK.

But Mrs Hadfield believes there could be more families affected and has set up a Facebook campaign to try to track them down.

One such child is eight-year-old Lucas Carleton from Liverpool who has been off school for nearly a year and can sleep up to 20 hours per day.

His mother Pauline said: “He was a humorous little boy who used to make me laugh so much. He had a wicked sense of humour.

“All that’s gone and all that’s left is this angry frustrated little boy. It’s heartbreaking, absolutely heartbreaking.”

(Source: BBC)

Parents who do not have their children fully immunised will be stripped of family tax benefits under a scheme announced by the Federal Government.

The Government says 11 per cent of five-year-olds are not immunised and has announced a shake-up of the system which will take effect from July 1 next year.

Under the changes, families who refuse vaccinations face losing up to $2,100 per child in benefits.

Families will need to have their children fully immunised to receive the Family Tax Benefit (FTB) Part A end-of-year supplement.

A new immunisation check will be introduced for one-year-olds to supplement the existing immunisation checks at two and five years of age.

The FTB supplement, worth $726 per child each year, will now only be paid once a child is fully immunised at these checks.

Families are already required to have their child fully immunised to receive Child Care Benefit and the Child Care Rebate.

Children will also be required for the first time to be vaccinated against meningococcal C, pneumococcal and chicken pox.

Children will also be immunised against measles, mumps and rubella earlier, at 18 months instead of the current four years of age.

Health Minister Nicola Roxon is also announcing today a new campaign to advise parents and healthcare providers on what they can do to protect babies from whooping cough.

All parents of newborns will receive letters providing information on immunising against whooping cough and how to identify the disease and prevent it spreading.

“We know that immunisation is fundamental to a child’s lifelong health and that’s why we want to make sure children are immunised at the right time,” Ms Roxon said.

The Government says the changes will deliver savings of $209.1 million over four years.

(Source: abc.net.au)

The World Health Organisation is warning of the potential for an untreatable form of tuberculosis to develop on Australia’s doorstep.

It says infections of multi-drug resistant tuberculosis (MDR TB) in Papua New Guinea’s remote south-west have reached crisis levels.

The country’s health minister says tuberculosis is now a greater health emergency than HIV/AIDS.

Dr Catharina Van Weezenbeek, from the World Health Organisation, says it is now clear the problem is in a state of emergency.

“If you just look at the numbers of MDR TB cases, it’s clear that we’re dealing with a crisis,” she said.

“Children 14-years-old infected with MDR TB in a family with already five patients dying.”

A research team from WHO found the rural health centres are rundown with very limited or no medical supplies.

There is no TB coordinator in the region so no one is monitoring patients to ensure they stick to the lengthy treatment of drugs required to beat the disease, meaning many do not.

WHO’s Dr Donald Enarson says that has led to the emergence of MDR TB.

“Multi-drug resistance has passed from being created from bad treatment to now being established in a community by itself and spreading among community members,” he said.

Local medical records show 94 people have contracted MDR TB in Western Province since 2005.

But the records are incomplete and WHO suspects those cases are just the tip of a much bigger iceberg.

The organisation’s MDR TB expert, Dr Ernesto Jaramillo, says the situation has the potential to get much worse.

“When treatment is delivered under the current conditions which many patients are having, then it’s a matter of months or years before we have forms of TB that cannot be cured,” she said.

Clinics closed

Half the identified cases of MDR TB were treated at tuberculosis clinics in the Torres Strait which is just a short boat ride across the maritime border with Australia.

Earlier this year Queensland’s Department of Health said it would close the clinics because of a funding dispute with the Federal Health Department.

Australian tuberculosis experts have criticised the move as irresponsible.

But Dr Van Weezenbeek says despite the best of intentions, the treatment of PNG nationals across the border has contributed to the emergence of MDR TB.

“The cross border is, in fact, is complicating the situation. In fact most of those patients are being lost,” she said.

PNG’s health minister Jamie Maxtone-Raham responded to WHO’s report by saying TB is now a greater health risk than the country’s HIV/AIDS epidemic.

“It’s very frightening,” he said. “HIV/AIDS is more confined to people who are active, sexually active. But multi-drug resistant TB, the whole home is all at risk.”

Australia’s aid agency AusAID has provided $1 million to improve health facilities in Western Province before the Torres Strait clinics close.

The money is being used to train and recruit medical staff, to purchase a boat for outreach programs, and to construct a TB ward at the hospital on Daru Island.

A gradual clinical handover of PNG patients being treated in the Torres Strait is underway but an AusAID spokesman says they won’t be transferred if there’s no treatment support in their local area.

A decision on whether to keep the clinics open will be made in January.

Despite the dire warning of the potential for an untreatable form of tuberculosis to develop, Dr Van Weezenbeek is confident MDR TB can be contained.

“We have the measure and momentum now,” she said.

“We have Australian Aid assisting. We have technical assistance of all the partners. We have commitment of the PNG government. We have very committed and competent people now in place.”

(Source: abc.net.au)

The latest scandal to hit the CDC is explosive: what appears to be a deliberate cover-up of damning scientific data.

Thimerosal, a controversial mercury compound used as a preservative in certain vaccines, was removed from all vaccines in Denmark in 1992. A subsequent Danish study showed a marked decline in autism rates following the removal of thimerosal, indicating a clear link between mercury in vaccines and the development of autism.

Documents obtained by the Coalition for Mercury-free Drugs (CoMeD) through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) suggest that officials at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were fully aware of the Danish data, yet published an article about the study in the journal Pediatricswhich excluded this information, manipulated the data to misrepresent the decline as an increase, and propagated the erroneous conclusion that thimerosal in vaccines does not cause autism.

As CoMeD noted, one of the Danish study’s co-authors was aware of the omission in the initial draft of the Pediatrics article, and alerted CDC officials in a 2002 email: “Attached I send you the short and long manuscript about thimerosal and autism in Denmark. I need to tell you that [your] figures do not include the latest data from 2001, but the incidence and prevalence are still decreasing in 2001.”

The lead author of the Pediatrics article seemed to be aware of the missing autism data, because he replied in an email, “I am not currently at the university but I will contact you and <names withheld> tomorrow to make up our minds.” Despite this, the data from 2001 showing a decline in autism was not mentioned in the draft of the Pediatrics article, and in a 2002 letter to the editor of Pediatrics, CDC officials encouraged expedited review and publication of the article. The misleading article was published by Pediatrics in 2003.

CoMeD, led by biochemist Brian Hooker, PhD, is demanding that the CDC launch an immediate investigation of the officials involved to determine if there was scientific fraud. CoMeD is also calling for a full retraction of the deceptive Pediatrics article.

The CoMeD work and other elements of this scandal have also been brilliantly reported by Tim Bolen on his must-read Bolen Report.

This is not the first scandal to hit the CDC in recent years. Earlier this year, Dr. Poul Thorsen, one of the co-authors of the Pediatrics article and “scientist-in-residence” at the CDC from 2000 to 2002, was indicted in Atlanta for fraud and money laundering in relation to his $11 million grant from the CDC. And just last week, Dr. Kimberly Quinlan Lindsey, a top CDC official, was arrested and charged with two counts of child molestation and one count of bestiality.

While thimerosal has been removed from most vaccines in the US, it is still routinely used in vaccines given to children in the Third World— in other words, to kids who may have compromised immune systems to start with, if their diet has been poor or the quality of the water they drink is bad. They need more protection, not less. In the US, thimerosal is still found in many flu shots, which are becoming increasingly routine for adults and strongly encouraged for the elderly and children.

Speaking of flu shots, a new study on the effectiveness of flu vaccines has been published in the British medical journal Lancet Infectious Diseases. The media is reporting that the study says flu shots are “only about 60% effective”—a lower percentage than the public had been told previously. Unfortunately, even the 60% figure is misleading.

In the study, test subjects were divided into two groups. The control group was not vaccinated; only 2.7 percent of them caught the flu. The treatment group received the vaccine, and of them, only 1.2 percent caught the flu. That means that for every 100 adults vaccinated, only 1.5 of them will avoid influenza as a result. Mike Adams has a fascinating analysis that reveals where the misleading 60% figure comes from (hint: it’s called “massaging the numbers,” and it’s an old statistical trick that the vaccine and pharmaceutical industries use to inflate their reports on the drug’s effectiveness).

Even the CDC admits, on its own website, that flu shot immunity is at best temporary. Why the shot does not confer the kind of immunity provided by other vaccines is not explained, but it presumably has to do with the changing nature of the flu virus. What is also not explained is why the CDC may recommend exactly the same shot two years in a row, which suggests that the agency does not think the flu virus has significantly changed, but the shot a year earlier is not expected to confer any remaining immunity. What is never explored is the possibility that the shot simply fails to confer much immunity at all, which could be tested by seeing if immunized people actually do get the flu, something that the government refuses to do.

Regular readers will know about vitamin D as a natural way to prevent and treat influenza viruses—including Swine Flu. A Japanese study last year showed that schoolchildren who were given vitamin D3 supplements were three times less likely to develop cold or flu symptoms as children who did not take the vitamin.

Speaking of Japan, an article in a respected medical journal points out that infants there get twelve vaccines, not the twenty-six that US infants are supposed to get. Infant mortality is also less than half what it is overall in the US. Clearly it needs more research. The same article states that the US administers more infant vaccines than any other developed nation and ranks behind 33 developed nations in infant mortality.

Politics aside, HPV vaccine safety data remain unchanged

U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) opposes requiring vaccination for the human papillomavirus, asserting that it can cause “mental retardation.” (Brian C. Frank / Reuters)

Despite Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann’s recent charge that the HPV vaccine can cause “mental retardation,” ongoing safety studies on the vaccine reveal no surprises, health officials said Tuesday.

“We have no evidence” that HPV vaccination causes mental retardation, said Dr. Eileen Dunne, an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, at a hearing of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, a panel that advises the CDC.

The committee voted 13-0 to recommend routine human papillomavirus vaccination for boys ages 11 and 12.

The vote included a review of the safety of the vaccine, which has been in use among girls in the United States since 2006.

The vaccine often causes soreness at the injection site, and more serious adverse events include fainting, said Julianne Gee, an epidemiologist with the CDC’s Immunization Safety Office.

Despite some reports of blood clots following vaccination, there is no evidence that the HPV vaccination causes clots, Gee said. The CDC is continuing to study blood clotting as a side effect in all types of vaccines.

Thirty-four confirmed deaths linked to the HPV vaccine have been reported to the CDC. But Gee said there is no distinct patterns to the deaths that might explain the role of the vaccine, if any.

(Source: Los Angeles Times)

There has long been controversy over the efficacy and safety of vaccinations. Parents have primarily been the ones to buck the system, but young family doctors are jumping on the bandwagon and have a different view on safety than their older counterparts.

In an abstract presented yesterday at the annual meeting of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, results of a small sample survey showed that younger primary care providers are less likely to believe in the benefits of vaccines, and that they may do more harm than good.

Typically, one side of the fence was made up of parents and a few medical professionals; while the other side was primarily disease control specialists and medical professionals, backed by government agencies. Those specialists have helped to shape the current level of required vaccinations.

While fear is one of the driving factors in vaccination—people are loathe to chance infectious diseases on the smallest members of society—there is merit behind many of the vaccinations. But, the parents ask, at what cost? And where do we draw the line?

This is a question many younger doctors are asking, and approximately 15 percent of them are on the side of the parents, believing that vaccinations are less effective than doctors trained in generations before them. In fact, the survey found that younger graduates were less likely to believe that inactivated or oral polio, measles, mumps, rubella, and varicella vaccines are safe.

Current generations have little knowledge of the polio outbreak that crippled children and adults alike, and gave rise to the expanded use of the iron lung and Jonas Salk’s early polio vaccine. Polio epidemics in the 1940s and 1950s affected hundreds of thousands, but after the first vaccination push in 1957, only 5,600 cases were reported, and the decline continued each year. In 1994, the Western Hemisphere was declared polio-free, due to widespread inoculation.

But what about chicken pox? This generally benign disease is rarely more than irritating in young children. However, the older the patient, the more serious the complications. Approximately 15,000 are hospitalized and 100 die annually. Without the vaccination, would the rate be higher? Or, if we allowed our children to contract the pox at an early age, and avoid late exposure where risk is highest, would we be better off?

Because doctors have a strong impact on patient care and the proactive nature of vaccination, we could see a backward slide and a jump in preventable diseases. We’ve already seen this in pertussis, also called whopping cough. This disease is seeing a resurgence in the U.S., after almost total eradication.

The study authors believe that by educating medical students in a way that they see the importance of vaccines and vaccine-preventable diseases could help reverse the trend in thinking. But maybe there should be a happy medium. Question authority and the standard of care, open a dialogue, and work together to find what is best for patients and society as a whole.

(Source: healthnews.com)