Which do you think is more likely to have caused these deaths? Vitamin A or the Polio vaccine?

http://indiabroad.rediff.com/news/2002/jan/21assam.htm

Poor response to pulse polio campaign in Assam

G Vinayak in Guwahati

Alarmed by the poor response to the first phase of pulse polio immunisation drive held on Sunday, the Assam government has decided to undertake a special two-day door-to-door drive to administer the polio vaccine to as many children as possible.

Although 4.2 million children were targeted by the state's health department under the first phase of vaccination held across the state on Sunday, less than 50 per cent of the children turned up as parents feared a repeat of the November 11 tragedy when 23 children died soon after being administered Vitamin A drops.

According to the state director of health and family welfare, Dr SN Thakuria, only 50 per cent of the children in rural areas and about 36 per cent in the urban centres could be given the polio drops on
Sunday.

"It is unfortunate, but true that many impoverished parents are apprehensive about their children's health after witnessing what happened during the Vitamin A campaign," Dr Gokul Sarma, a leading paediatrician in Guwahati, said.

Neither the UNICEF nor the Assam government accepted the responsibility for the death of 23 children in November 2001, although the Assam Human Rights Commission has indicted the state government for negligence in running the campaign and has recommended payment of compensation to the parents of the victims.

Health experts now fear that the target of eradicating polio in the country by 2003 might suffer a setback since the success of such mass campaigns depend upon wider coverage. "Even if a couple of thousand children are left out of the drive, the wild virus may remain within the community leading to polio cases in the future," an UNICEF official said on condition of anonymity.

The door-to-door survey planned for Tuesday may increase the coverage by another 20 to 30 per cent, but that is not enough to meet the targets, health officials said. The second round pulse polio vaccination is slated for February 14, but given the apprehensions in the minds of the people, it is unlikely that many more parents will come out in larger numbers, health officials said'.'

 

I knew that was too good to be true.... the spin begins...... now its just suspect.

5-week-old foster child dies at DYFS office

A 5-week-old foster child died at a state Division of Youth and Family Services office in Newark yesterday, shortly after a routine visit to a medical clinic where he received a vaccination.

A DYFS aide bringing newborn Zaire Knott from the clinic to the office on Halsey Street noticed the infant was having trouble breathing and was bleeding from his nose, state spokesman Andy Williams said.

The aide rushed the boy inside DYFS District Office #1, where an in-house nurse urgently gave the newborn cardiopulmonary resuscitation. Although the nurse was assisted by emergency medical technicians who managed to regain a pulse, the baby died in the office at 12:46 p.m., Williams said.

"An exact cause of death will be determined at a later date pending the results of an autopsy," according to the police statement.

DYFS officials suspect the immunizations -- for hepatitis B and polio -- "caused the distress or some sort of reaction," Williams said.

"We'll review the circumstances, but it sounds like a medical complication. We'll look at exactly what was done after they discovered the baby was in distress," Williams added. But one expert said fatal reactions to those routine vaccinations are nearly unheard of. "Every (vaccine) has risk," said Susan Morrison, an immunology and pediatric infectious disease specialist at Clara Maass Medical Center in Belleville. But she added, "I have never, in 25 years, heard of anyone dying within an hour of getting the vaccine for the first exposure time. ... In my experience, I have never had anyone have a life-threatening complication to polio and hepatitis B (vaccines)."

A person can die from a severe allergic reaction to a component of a vaccine, but that requires previous exposure to that substance, Morrison said. "And at this age, I find it very hard to believe that would happen."

Why would a 5 week old baby get a polio vaccine? This typically happens at 8 weeks.

Now that is more like it. Vaccines have nothing to do with this death......

http://www.philly.com/mld/philly/news/12966122.htm
Posted on Fri, Oct. 21, 2005

  No cause yet determined for death of infant at DYFS office

Associated Press


NEWARK, N.J. - The New Jersey Office of the Child Advocate said it does not suspect an adverse reaction to vaccinations or foul play to have been the cause of death for a month-old boy at a state welfare services agency Thursday. Zaire Knott, who had been in foster care since he was born on Sept. 16, suffered respiratory arrest at a state Division of Youth and Family Services office in Newark. The boy was pronounced dead at 12:46 p.m. at St. Michael's Medical Center.

While DYFS officials initially suspected the infant might have died from an adverse reaction to a hepatitis B or polio vaccination that he was given by a private doctor, they said Friday there was no medical evidence indicating that.

(I wonder what that medical evidence is.....)
As of late Friday, no cause of death had been determined, and the Essex County Medical Examiner's Office still had not completed its autopsy, according to representatives for the state Department of Human Services.

Human Services Commissioner James Davy told News 12 New Jersey that DYFS was not at fault in the death of the boy. The infant was being transported to the DYFS office for a visit with his biological mother when an aide noticed that he was having trouble breathing and had blood in his nose. The boy was brought to the office nurse, who attempted to resuscitate him until an ambulance crew arrived.
 

Now they are positive.....Its not a vaccine reaction

Riots in Algeria as vaccine kills seven babies
(Filed: 26/12/2001)

RIOTS swept through the Algerian town of Oued el Abtal after the deaths of seven babies who had received measles vaccinations. Residents fought police and set fire to government buildings when the town's prefect arrived to attend the children's funerals. Police fired warning shots in an attempt to disperse the crowd in the town near Mascara, about 225 miles west of Algiers. The seven victims were between three and 18 months old. Three died immediately after receiving the injections last week as part of a vaccination campaign and four others died within an hour, witnesses said.

Dozens more were taken to hospital in a serious condition. Local doctors claimed that the vaccine had passed its expiry date, but health authorities later denied this and said the vaccination had been administered incorrectly.

www.portal.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2001/12/26/walg2
6.xml&sSheet=/news/2001/12/26/ixworld.html
 

Scientists examine CJD 'link' to polio vaccine

18.12.2001

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/storydisplay.cfm?story
ID=333566&msg=emaillink

Senior British Government advisers yesterday sought to head off a potential public health scare after two people with the human form of BSE were found to have shared the same batch of polio vaccine. Although the two victims of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) both swallowed the oral form of the vaccine – which was made using bovine blood –scientists believe the cases are an unlucky coincidence. Professor Peter Smith, chairman of the Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee (Seac), revealed that an investigation by scientists has failed to find evidence of a link between other cases of vCJD and the polio vaccine.

However, Seac scientists are concerned that even raising the possibility of a link between vCJD and the vaccine could turn parents away from childhood immunisation programmes which have already suffered bad publicity over alleged health risks. "We were worried on the committee that this might affect whether parents would want their children to be vaccinated in this country," said Deidre Cunningham, a public health specialist and new member of Seac.

"We thought that an absolutely infinitesimal risk was absolutely no justification for ruining a vaccination and immunisation programme that actually does protect people’s health," Dr Cunningham said. The two vCJD patients are part of a group of five "geographically associated cases" in the Southampton area. Both patients were given oral polio vaccine from a batch distributed in 1994, six years prior to the vaccine being banned. Each batch consisted of between 70,000 and 80,000 doses of vaccine and was part of a larger consignment of about 5m doses each made by an identical process of growing the vaccine in blood serum drawn from foetal calves.

The Department of Health recalled the vaccine in October 2000 after it discovered that it breached European guidelines banning the use of foetal calf serum from countries affected by BSE. However, a comparison of patients with vCJD and healthy people failed to find evidence to suggest that the vaccine could have caused the transfer of BSE from cattle to humans. "Looking at the cases as a whole, there is really nothing to implicate this source of polio vaccine. The committee did not think that this was in any way persuasive evidence for a link to the vaccine," Professor Smith said.

So far there have been 112 cases of vCJD and most of them have been in people younger than 30, the group most likely to have received polio vaccine over the past 20 years. "Both of these individuals were young adults when they received the vaccine. The vaccine is generally given to infants but quite a lot of us should receive polio vaccine at later ages, as did these two individuals,"Professor Smith said. "The fact that two had received vaccine from this one batch did not strike us as a reason for really changing the advice that had previously been given," he said.

Both patients lived in the Southampton area, were of a similar age and could have shared many other features of their lifestyle, including diet. "It’s highly likely that they would have had polio vaccine from the same batch –that’s why we didn’t attribute any particular significance to this," Professor Smith said. Extensive tests have failed to find any evidence that BSE can be transmitted in the blood of adult cattle with the disease, let alone immature foetuses, said Ray Bradley, a veterinary scientist and member of Seac.

"We’ve tested many components of bovine blood and foetal calf blood by bioassay and can find no detectable infectivity in any of those materials," Mr Bradley said. "Foetal calf serum is used in most viral vaccines at the stage where you grow the cells and there have been literally millions of bovine and ovine vaccines prepared in this manner and no evidence whatsoever that there’s even been any transmission of BSE," he said.
 

Another Human Guinea Pig Story with dangerous unproved vaccines

<http://www.nzherald.co.nz/storydisplay.cfm?reportID=16>
Meningococcal epidemic - fighting a killer

18.02.2002
Plans to vaccinate everyone aged under 20 against meningococcal disease depend on the success of a trial starting in Auckland shortly. ANDREW LAXON reports. In a few months volunteers should start walking through the doors of the University of Auckland medical school, rolling up their sleeves and giving blood samples. The 90 human guinea pigs will then be given an injection against meningococcal meningitis, the disease that has killed 184 New Zealanders, many of them children, in the past decade.

Thirty will get a new vaccine, developed specifically for New Zealand. Thirty will get a variation on this vaccine, and the rest will get the Norwegian vaccine, which served as model for our version. The 18-to-50-year-olds taking part in this clinical trial - possibly Auckland Hospital doctors and nurses if other Aucklanders are reluctant to come forward by May - will take away a diary to record any reactions, such as a sore arm or a temperature. Six weeks later, they will be back for another dose and another blood test to see if the vaccine is working. In six more weeks, they will return for their final dose and blood test (all sent to Government laboratories for evaluation, with checks by international experts).

Then scientists will start to know whether the $100 million experiment to stop New Zealand's worst infectious disease is working.

For Professor Diana Lennon, the childhood infectious diseases specialist running the trial, an even more important test will come in the next phase.If the vaccine works on adults, she hopes to start trials among 100 to 150 older schoolchildren this year, before moving on to the same numbers of toddlers and babies. She describes this as the absolute "stop-go" point of the trial - children under 5 with poorly developed immune systems are the disease's biggest victims.

If the second phase works, the vaccine will gradually be introduced into high-risk areas such as South Auckland. If it brings the disease rate down with no severe side-effects, the vaccine will be used to immunise a million New Zealanders under the age of 20. After that, meningococcal B vaccine could become part of the child immunisation schedule given at six weeks, three months and five months (with shots against hepatitis B, diphtheria and measles, mumps and rubella) within the next five years. All this involves a lot of "ifs", but the scale of meningococcal disease has given the search for a vaccine a sense of urgency. Since 1991 New Zealand has suffered 184 deaths and the epidemic is expected to last another decade, with 4000 more cases and 200 more deaths.

One in every 100 Maori and Pacific Island children under 5 can expect to catch meningococcal disease, which is strongly linked to poverty. Although no one knows exactly what causes it to spread, Auckland researchers have shown that the risk here increases with household overcrowding. Overseas research has suggested a link with passive smoking, but not enough to account for all the cases. As a result, public health specialists regard an effective vaccine as the best hope of fighting meningococcal meningitis. The problem is that finding one for the New Zealand strain has been challenging scientists for decades.

All vaccines work by giving the body a tame version of the real disease which gradually builds up the body's natural defences. The trick in developing a new vaccine is to find the substance in the bug carrying the disease which will provoke human antibodies into a hostile reaction. Although the presence of antibodies does not guarantee a successful vaccine, it is considered a reliable guide. Scientists scrutinising the blood tests in the Auckland clinical trial will therefore be looking for a certain level of antibodies - Professor Lennon says the exact "pass rate" is still to be determined - to see if the vaccine is working.

In the case of meningococcal meningitis, the disease comes in three main types - A, B and C. Since the late 1960s, vaccines based on purified sugar molecules known as polysaccharides from capsules on the outer coat of the bacteria have been used against groups A and C. But these vaccines do not work against meningococcal B. There is an added danger that the polysaccharide-based vaccine has a chemical which resembles substances in brain tissue. In theory, this could trick the immune system into attacking the brain as well as the disease.

So researchers in the 1970s decided to change tack. They reasoned that since most people who came down with meningococcal B disease seemed to be immune to second episodes, the meningococcal B bacterium itself must contain the tools for immunity. Studies showed that the blood of patients recovering from meningococcal B contained antibodies which had formed against the outer membrane protein (OMP) and a lipopolysaccharide (LPS), a lipid-sugar molecule.

There have since been encouraging but mixed results with this method in three countries closely studied by New Zealand researchers - Cuba, the Netherlands and Norway. In the 1980s, Cuban researchers reported an 80 per cent success rate among 106,000 students with an OMP-based vaccine. But when the same vaccine was given to 2.4 million Brazilian children aged 3 months to 6 years old, it proved only 47 per cent effective for 2-to-4-year-olds and did not seem to work at all for children under 2. New Zealand eventually rejected the Cuban vaccine. However, Professor Lennon says, the poor result in Brazil may have been caused by a badly conducted trial, rather than the vaccine itself, which later showed promise in Chile. In 1996, New Zealand came close to an agreement with Dutch public health officials, who had been working on a similar vaccine.

But neither country pursued the idea hard enough - Professor Lennon says the epidemic here had waned and some officials thought it might be over - so momentum was lost. Meanwhile, Norwegian researchers had put together a vaccine which initially did not seem as promising. It was only 58 per cent effective when tested on 171,800 children aged 12 to 16 and protection levels later fell away. Not surprisingly, Norwegian public health specialists did not recommend that all children should be given the vaccine. Professor Lennon says the results turned out to be better than they looked. As in the Brazilian trial, the children had been given only two doses instead of three. The vaccine had protected 87 per cent after 10 months, suggesting that a third dose could lock in the immunity.

The other potential problem was that experience showed every strain of meningococcal B was different, so the proteins collected from one strain had limited effectiveness against another. The answer was to take a protein from the New Zealand strain and use the Norwegian technique to make a new "designer" vaccine. That was the approach taken by American vaccine maker Chiron - whose meningococcal C vaccine has been widely used in Britain and Canada - in collaboration with Norway's National Institute of Public Health. Their proposal secured the contract with the Ministry of Health, announced by the Government last month.

Ministry public health specialist Dr Jane O'Hallahan says the Norwegian-Chiron bid was not just the best product. One of the main difficulties in getting a vaccine had been finding a company able to supply more than three million doses for the New Zealand market. Chiron met several important criteria, including manufacturing capacity and company expertise to back up its product. Dr O'Hallahan says she is 90 per cent confident that the vaccine will work, based on positive comments by a panel of international experts which the Health Research Council has commissioned to check on the ministry's work.

For Professor Lennon, the immediate hurdle is gaining ethical approval to begin trials in May. It looks likely, but as the trials continue, obstacles are bound to become tougher. For instance, she says, half the children in the second-phase trials will be given the new meningococcal B vaccine. The other half - the control group - will receive a jab for meningococcal C, which gives limited protection, rather than a placebo such as water. This is for ethical and practical rather than scientific reasons, she explains.  It is hard enough to persuade parents to volunteer their children for tests of an unproven vaccine, without the prospect that the children will not benefit at all.

nzherald.co.nz/health
<http://www.nzherald.co.nz/storydisplay.cfm?reportID=16>

©Copyright 2002, New Zealand Herald

From Ray Gallup:

I called Dan Burton's office this afternoon at 202 225-5074 and Susan, an aide there told me that the testimony should be up as early as late this afternoon on the web site or as late as early morning, June 21st. I understand that a few people interviewed Andy Wakefield before the hearing....including Mothering Mazagine....naturally the major networks like CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN and FOX dropped the ball. The US press is what you would find in a third-world country....nowhere the equal of the UK press.

You will probably see the testimony on
http://www.house.gov/reform/020619_autism_hearing.html

http://www.house.gov/reform/

 

The best source for a hard-hitting, factual analysis that I have ever seen is Nicholas Regush's Health News Analyzer. For $.15/day, you will learn what is really going on in the healthcare industry and how we are being misled by twisted half-truths and stories that are full of errors of omission.

Here's a sample of what you will read:

JUNE 3, 2002: HEALTH NEWS ANALYZER
#36

HEPATITIS B VACCINE REPORT

I hope you had a chance to read the story on hepatitis B vaccine over the weekend and to pinpoint the glaring problem with it. In any case, here is the URL once again. It will take you to the Reuters home page. Then click on the Date Search at the top of the page and click on May 30. The story will then be posted in the menu on the left side of the page. Scroll down and look for the story, entitled, "Hepatitis B, Nerve Diseases Not Linked: US Report."

http://www.reutershealth.com/frame2/eline.html

(If you can't click on the above URL, you can cut and paste it into your browser.) So what's wrong with this story? Plenty. And it is typical of numerous stories about vaccines. The story reports that an Institute of Medicine (IOM) panel concluded that "there is no hard link between hepatitis B vaccination and later development of multiple sclerosis and other neurological diseases in adults." The report informs us that "the panel also said not enough evidence exists to connect the vaccine with neurological diseases in infants given the shot. The group recommended further studies of the disorders in vaccinated children, but called for no review of current national immunization policies."

There are other points made in the story that deserve our attention:

1. One IOM member said: "Hopefully our report will ease the concerns of adults who need to be immunized against hepatitis B and are worried about the risk for multiple sclerosis."

2. Reuters informs us that available evidence shows no connection between the vaccine and neurological disorders.

Okay, so on the one hand, we get the message that the IOM really found no connection between hepatitis B and neurological diseases -and this is strongly played up in the piece at the very beginning, in the middle and at the end.

We are being reassured that there is likely no problem. And this reassurance is further linked to public concerns about vaccines in general:

1. "Patients' concerns [about the hepatitis B vaccine] have also worried physicians, who fear that vaccine fears may be steering parents and at-risk adults away from obtaining protection against Hepatitis B."

2. There is a comment at the end of the story that "government and private health organizations work to ease the public's fears about vaccine safety."

If there was a better ad written by a reporter for the hepatitis B vaccine, I haven't seen it.

Mind you, there is some reference in the Reuters story to "theoretical concern" that the vaccine could help trigger damage to the nervous system. And there is also what amounts to a passing reference to the lack of studies searching for a link between a vaccine-neurological illness link other than MS.

The fact is, hepatitis B vaccine, like other vaccines, is poorly-tested for short and long-term safety - THE KEY POINT MISSING IN THIS STORY.

Also missing is the fact that little research was done AFTER the vaccine was marketed. When it comes to vaccines, scientific research is in the Stone Age. And missing big time is any intelligent probing of the wide range of serious side-effects that have been reported in both adults and children.

So what is the value of the IOM Report and why do we continue to get skewed news about what the IOM manages to conclude on the basis of little information? The REAL beneficiaries of the IOM report are the drug companies that make vaccines because news distribution about "the lack of data" is presented in such a way that it suggests a vaccine is safe and that we have little reason to worry about it.

I won't get into this today, but at some point I'll present you with intriguing data on how the IOM routinely makes silk out of a sow's ear, when it comes to comments on so-called "available science."  A hint for a later time: When you see INSTITUTE OF MEDICINE,  think medical politics.

And furthermore: LACK OF STRONG EVIDENCE OF HARM SHOULD NOT TRANSLATE INTO PROOF OF SAFETY OR REASSURANCE!

It just may mean that the science hasn't been done or has been corrupted.