E-NEWS FROM THE NATIONAL VACCINE INFORMATION CENTER
Vienna, Virginia http://www.909shot.com
"Protecting the health and informed consent rights of children since 1982."
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BLFisher Note: It is no surprise to the co-founders of the National Vaccine
Information Center that this study confirms the fact that the whole cell
pertussis vaccine causes twice as many seizures as the purified acellular
pertussis vaccine.  Japanese scientists knew it when they took NIH
technology
and made a less toxic acellular pertussis vaccine available to Japanese
babies in 1981. It took 14 more years for the US, in 1996, to finally
license
the less reactive acellular pertussis vaccine (DtaP) for babies in response
to continued pressure placed on the system by parents whose children were
injured or died after being injected with whole cell pertussis vaccine
(DPT).
 This acknowledgement that the whole cell pertussis vaccine causes seizures
at twice the rate of the purified acellular pertussis vaccine is further
vindication of the case that Harris Coulter and I made 16 years ago in DPT:
A
Shot in the Dark, first published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1985 and
now in its fourth printing (Avery/Penguin Putnam).

http://www.medscape.com/reuters/prof/2001/04/04.30/20010427publ002.html


Safety of Acellular Pertussis Vaccine Corroborated
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ATLANTA (Reuters Health) Apr 27 - Acellular pertussis (aP) vaccine is less
likely to cause seizures than whole cell pertussis (wP) vaccine, according
to a study of nearly a million children aged 2 years or younger by the US
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Concerns about the safety of wP vaccine led to the development and licensure
of aP vaccines. Pre-licensure aP trials suggested a lower rate of severe
adverse events such as seizures, but according to the researchers, these
studies were smaller and of limited followup duration.

Researchers led by Dr. Young J. Hur, of the CDC's National Immunization
Program, evaluated data from the CDC's Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD) to
determine the safety of aP in a larger population. They presented their
findings here at the CDC's 50th annual Epidemic Intelligence Service
Conference.

Dr. Hur and colleagues analyzed computerized vaccination, hospitalization,
and emergency room data from 1992 to 1999 in a cohort of 903,000 children
aged 2 years or younger enrolled in three VSD health maintenance
organizations. By 1997, all HMOs had begun using aP in the first year of
life.

They found that the relative risk for seizures following aP was 0.85 on the
day of vaccination, 0.76 on the day after vaccination, and 0.95 at 2 to 14
days after vaccination. In contrast, wP was associated with an increased
relative risk of seizures, 2.27, on the day of vaccination, which rose to
2.58 on the day after vaccination.

"Based on this data, aP should be substituted for wP vaccine, but we will
still need to determine whether aP causes fewer rare serious adverse
events," Dr. Hur told Reuters Health.

"We will be looking in more detail at the difference in adverse events
between aP and wP," he said. "We will look at the effects in older children
up to 7 years  and separate out febrile versus afebrile seizures."

According to Dr. Melinda Wharton of the CDC's National Immunization Program,
the results of an unpublished study of older children conducted by the
National Institutes of Health indicate that pertussis vaccination is equally
as safe and efficacious in older children.

"Prevention of pertussis is a challenging task," Dr. Wharton told Reuters
Health. "We know the vaccine appears safe, but what we don't know is [to
whom] pertussis vaccine should be given."





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