Foul spirit of '76 haunts H1N1 response
Vaccine killed more people than the disease
How difficult is it going to be to get people vaccinated against H1N1 pandemic influenza A? In addition to the off-the-wall conspiracy theories and the burgeoning anti-vaccine movement spearheaded by parents of autistic children, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is having to revisit the inconvenient truth that another H1N1 "swine flu" vaccine actually was linked to paralysis and fatalities in the "pseudo-pandemic" of 1976.
"There is this lingering concern from 1976 regarding Guillain-Barré syndrome [GBS]," says William Schaffner, MD, chairman of the department of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, TN.
A rare autoimmune disease in which the body turns on its own nerve cells, GBS is sometimes heralded by enteric infection with Campylobacter jejuni. Responding to a feared H1N1 pandemic that never materialized, public health officials immunized more than 40 million people with a newly developed vaccine in 1976. There were several hundred cases of GBS that included a reported 25 deaths, prompting the enduring observation that the vaccine killed more people than the disease did. In that regard, federal public health officials have posted information about the 1976 situation in light of the current pandemic and tried to reassure the public that the 2009 H1N1 vaccine is safe.
"The [1976] investigation found that vaccine recipients had a higher risk for GBS than those who were not vaccinated (about one additional case occurred per 100,000 people vaccinated)," government health officials state on www.flu.gov. "Given this association, and the fact that the swine flu disease was limited, the vaccination program was stopped. The Institute of Medicine conducted a thorough scientific review in 2003 and concluded that people who received the 1976 swine influenza vaccine had a slight increased risk for developing GBS. Scientists have multiple theories on why this increased risk may have occurred, but the exact reason for this association remains unknown. Since then, numerous studies have been done to evaluate if other flu vaccines were associated with GBS. In most studies, no association was found, but two studies suggested that approximately one additional person out of 1 million vaccinated people may be at risk for GBS associated with the seasonal influenza vaccine."
That means an average person is more likely to be struck by lightning (estimated at a 1 in 700,000 chance) than suffer GBS after a flu shot. And long forgotten in the aftermath of the 1976 debacle, is the fact that tens of thousands of lives might have been saved by the vaccine had an actual pandemic occurred.
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