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Wednesday, February 19, 2025

Swine flu vaccine raises troubling questions

by

20091025

The Min­is­ter of Health has promised H1N1 vac­cines will be avail­able in T&T by next month. But at home and abroad the de­bate rages over the safe­ty of and need for these con­tro­ver­sial vac­cines. As Glen­da Col­lens, a par­ent, put it in re­sponse to a ques­tion thrown out on Face­book, "The idea of shoot­ing my­self up with an ex­per­i­men­tal drug that has not re­al­ly been giv­en enough time to find out the side ef­fects is giv­ing me pause."

The vac­cine is es­pe­cial­ly rec­om­mend­ed for peo­ple at high risk of con­tract­ing the virus com­mon­ly known as swine flu. Chil­dren are a high-risk group, as are health­care work­ers, preg­nant women, peo­ple over age 65, peo­ple with re­duced im­mune sys­tems and peo­ple with un­der­ly­ing med­ical con­di­tions, in­clud­ing di­a­betes and asth­ma. The US Cen­ters for Dis­ease Con­trol (CDC) said on its Web site, "CDC... be­lieves that the ben­e­fits of vac­ci­na­tion with the 2009 H1N1 in­fluen­za vac­cine will far out­weigh the risks."

What are the risks?

The H1N1 vac­cine comes in a nasal spray and an in­jec­tion. The in­jec­tion is man­u­fac­tured with the live virus that has been made un­able to re­pro­duce; the nasal spray, from the virus that has been killed. The vac­cine will cause the body to make an­ti­bod­ies to the dis­ease with­out ac­tu­al­ly con­tract­ing its most se­ri­ous form. Some but not all peo­ple who re­ceive the vac­cine ex­pe­ri­ence a run­ny nose, fever, pain at the site of the in­jec­tion, headache or nau­sea. A grow­ing num­ber of dis­senters ar­gue that the vac­cine was rushed through de­vel­op­ment–many vac­cines take years to make, while the swine flu shot was made in re­sponse to a virus that reared its head on­ly months ago. They ar­gue it hasn't been prop­er­ly or thor­ough­ly test­ed, and that a preser­v­a­tive in­gre­di­ent that is op­tion­al­ly added to the in­ject­ed shot has been linked with can­cer.

In re­sponse to the ques­tion, "Any­body got the H1N1 vac­cine yet?" one Face­book­er, Wayne O'Brady, re­spond­ed: "The lack of in­for­ma­tion as to what this 'vac­cine' is com­posed of and its long-term side ef­fects is quite trou­bling to me. The pub­lic good can­not be served by blind­ly ad­min­is­ter­ing such drugs with­out prop­er re­search." An­oth­er re­spon­dent, Gillian God­dard, said, "Ab­solute­ly no way! Have you been fol­low­ing the re­cent vac­cines and what they are do­ing to peo­ple–the Hep B and the HPV? No way." Hep B refers to he­pati­tis type B; con­tro­ver­sial stud­ies of the Hep B vac­cine have linked it to the in­ci­dence of mul­ti­ple scle­ro­sis. HPV is short for Hu­man­i­cla pa­pil­lo­mavirus, which caus­es gen­i­tal warts and cer­vi­cal can­cer; the safe­ty of the vac­cine against HPV has been ques­tioned af­ter women re­port­ed de­vel­op­ing Guil­lain-Barr� Syn­drome (GBS) and blood clots, or died af­ter get­ting the shot.

The same type of con­tro­ver­sy has dogged the swine flu shot, ex­ac­er­bat­ed by the prob­lems with a pre­vi­ous swine flu shot giv­en in 1976 in the US. Nat­u­ral­news.com, an In­ter­net source for news on al­ter­na­tive or eco­log­i­cal is­sues, quotes an­ti-vac­cine ac­tivist Jim Turn­er as say­ing, "[In 1976] they were in­tend­ing to in­oc­u­late 200 mil­lion peo­ple. We stopped them... and some­where be­tween 40 and 50 mil­lion peo­ple were vac­ci­nat­ed. What ul­ti­mate­ly brought it down is that a sub­stan­tial num­ber of peo­ple got 'French Po­lio' (GBS), a paral­y­sis that goes... through the body, and if it goes far enough you die." The CDC and oth­ers dis­miss these fears as ir­ra­tional. Face­book re­spon­dent Petal Ma­haraj Hwang lives in New York City and has al­lowed her son to be im­mu­nised against H1N1 with the nasal spray ver­sion of the vac­cine. "Der had his first round on Sat­ur­day. Just a nose spray in each nos­tril. Took less than a minute and he's fine. I asked Der how he felt when the nurse ad­min­is­tered it and he said, 'It felt liq­uidy.'"

She has in­oc­u­lat­ed him against the sea­son­al flu be­fore and be­lieves the ben­e­fit of im­mu­nis­ing him against swine flu out­weighs any risk. She's not alone. The As­so­ci­at­ed Press re­ports, "Dr Anne Schuchat of the Cen­ters for Dis­ease Con­trol and Pre­ven­tion says she's sur­prised by all the mis­in­for­ma­tion go­ing around about the new vac­cine. She says a good safe­ty record from past vac­cines bodes well for the swine flu vac­cine now be­com­ing avail­able. Schuchat says vac­cines re­main the best way to pro­tect chil­dren and adults from both (sea­son­al and swine) flu." And though some would ar­gue it's a mat­ter of per­son­al choice, vac­cine skip­ping could have glob­al reper­cus­sions. Con­sid­er the resur­gence of the dis­ease per­tus­sis (whoop­ing cough). In the US it was re­port­ed at a rate of 1,000 cas­es a year in 1976, but over time crept back up to 26,000 cas­es in 2004, writes Amy Wal­lace in her sto­ry An Epi­dem­ic of Fear, in Wired mag­a­zine.

She said the rise is linked to a drop in vac­ci­na­tion lev­els. "The con­cept of herd im­mu­ni­ty is key here: It holds that, in dis­eases passed from per­son to per­son, it is more dif­fi­cult to main­tain a chain of in­fec­tion when large num­bers of a pop­u­la­tion are im­mune." The bot­tom line is that when those 250,000 vac­cines get to T&T, par­ents and oth­er high-risk groups will have a big choice to make, one which could have an im­pact on all of us.


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