http://detnews.com/2001/health/0104/20/a10-214323.htm

Feds review Lyme vaccine for safety
U.S. considers possible link between arthritis cases and vaccination

By Susan Okie / Washington Post

    WASHINGTON -- Vanessa Raffio was a horsewoman and a veterinarian's helper who loved hiking and riding in the woods -- hobbies that seemed to place the suburban New Jersey teen-ager at high risk for getting Lyme disease. So two years ago, Raffio, then 17, asked her doctor for the recently approved vaccine against the tick-borne infection.
   "I'm the one who pushed for it," recalled her mother, Linda Scharf-Lurie. "It was the biggest mistake of my life."
   These days, Raffio, a college freshman at the University of Missouri at Columbia, is able to ride a horse only for brief periods, and uses an electrical nerve stimulator to relieve her chronic pain.
   "I have arthritis ... pretty much everywhere but my knees," Raffio said.
   Raffio is one of more than 100 people whose arthritis or joint swelling is being investigated by the Food and Drug Administration because of possible links to the vaccine.
   Sidney M. Wolfe, director of the Public Citizen Health Research Group, said that the "vaccine is being grossly overpromoted to people who don't live in parts of the country where (Lyme disease) happens very much."
   Carmel Hogan, a spokeswoman for GlaxoSmithKline Inc., which makes the vaccine. "There is no causal link between this vaccine and arthritis."

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