Talk:Vaccine

See also: Wikipedia:Notice board for vaccine-related topics

What about use of the avian leukemia virus to manufacture vaccinations in chicken eggs and then the subsequent vaccine allergies associated with people who are allergic to eggs?

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"Despite the lck of evidence". *Snort* What suddenly makes mercury utterly harmless just because "Thimerosal" has been written on a label? I do wish folx like the FDA would treat their pharmochemicals with as much skepticism as they try to instill in us about medicines they can't make money on.

I'm sorry, this is just silly. It's based on a common misunderstanding. Thimerosal contains mercury in the same way that table salt contains chlorine. Chlorine is a poisonous gas used during the First World War as a chemical agent to kill or disable enemy troops.

Evidence that chlorine is dangerous doesn't mean that table salt is dangerous. To discover the dangers of salt you need to study salt, not chlorine! To discover the dangers of thimerosal, study thimerosal, not mercury. Nothing 'suddenly makes mercury utterly harmless', but nobody has claimed mercury to be safe. It's poisonous by ingestion and by breathing its vapour. But Thimerosal is not mercury! (Chris Jefferies, 6th December 2003)

So how come those who are looking at the the long-term effects of Thimerosal - ie "studying" it - and finding things you don't like, aren't looking at "evidence"? Why are they wrong, and not the politicised FDA (you think it's apolitical? Explain its tantrum about Canadian drugs)? I know perfectly well the difference between elements and their compounds - but we're not talking about an ionic compound essential to life as we know it. What's the proof this heavy metal has a bond in thimerosal strong enough to carry the Hg all the way through metabolism to excretion without side effects, esp and particularly in the several large per-body-mass doses given the developmentally sensitive very young? (I remind you that what little pharmochemical testing is done is in the main done in adults, not children, even in products targeted for children?) Your analogy with salt is as facile and misleading as that made by MSG lovers who say it's on the GRAS list, so are salt and vinegar so it must be safe (w/o regard for the scientifically dubious process by which the GRAS is maintained).

Thimerosal may be safe. But there're enough historical failings and worse by things like the FDA that I, personally, no longer trust authoritarian pronouncements. I want empirical science. I don't know if the rise in asthma, autism, "hyperactivity", etc are caused by inoculants, or the preservatives, or the pollution, or food additives, or leachates from the containers, or growth hormones, or TV, or the combination. But I see no good evidence anointed "proper authorities" are bothering to look or even "want" to look.

(And be careful writing (parroting?) phrases like "lack of evidence." I snicker every time i hear pronouncements about "lack of evidence" because a second look usually reveals there's no evidence because nobody's bothered to look for evidence. "Lack of evidence" is not equivalent to "null results.")

What I'm asking for, of course, is long-term blind large-sample science. It's unfortunate that the only way to get that for pharmochemicals like Thimerosal is to dump them on the market and watch what happens. Unfortunate, because it's treating people as guinea pigs instead of informed-consent patients, and because when contraindications do turn up the entities in charge of approving the release in the first place have every practical motive run contrary to telling the truth.

I stand by what I wrote, 'To discover the dangers of thimerosal, study thimerosal'; and most of your comment above agrees with that. Whether I (or you) 'like' the findings is not relevant - if studies of thimerosal show it to be unsafe then we all need to know. But to write, as you did, 'What suddenly makes mercury utterly harmless just because "Thimerosal" has been written on a label?', is silly. I don't believe anyone has claimed mercury to be safe because the word 'thimerosal' is written on a label! Please try to be more rational and people may take you more seriously. (Chris Jefferies, 11th December 2003)

Autism

The MMR vacine has never contained thimerosal. It would not work if it did. While you could claim that thimerosal contains ethly mercury you can see from it's structure[1] that it contains a phenyl ring and a carboxcilic acid salt. It's like claiming polystyrene contians benzene.

• smacks forehead* Yeah, I meant the DTP (Diphtheria Pertussis) vaccine, which DID contain thimerasol until the FDA revised their Mercury Containing Products act sometime in the late 1997. The MMR vaccine is supposedly immune-regulated. This is what happens when I "be bold" like they say in the help texts. *grins sheepishly*

All of the largest studies (which contain over 10,000 patients each) shows no statistical evidence supporting any vaccines causing autism. The supporting studies for the vaccines and autism have fewer than 1,000 (and in most cases, only a dozen or so) patients, and even then the link is tenuous at best. The real issue, I feel, and this is in no way related to the article, is the changing relationships between doctor and patient, especially when it deals with consent. In many ways, this controversy is similar to the circumcision debate: Should we, as parents, allow doctors to do these things to our kids just because they say so? The answer, of course, is that measles, mumps, diphtheria and a whole host of other diseases used to be the most common cause of death among those in developed nations. Now it's heart disease and cancer. It's a calculated risk, to be sure, but it's one that should be provided by informed choice, with doctors as counselors and information providers, rather than as authority figures. Of course, with multiple sources of information (the media, anti-vaccination groups, family magazines) other than the medical community, parenting decisions certainly ain't easy anymore.

Cleanup

I have gone through and removed the following from this article because it was either not npov, to specific for a general article on vaccines. *Kat* 08:04, Mar 30, 2005 (UTC)

Intro

Vaccines may also help the immune system to fight against degenerative cells (cancer).

Developing Immunity

More recent vaccine technologies have provided vaccines made of highly purified antigen components derived from the pathogens themselves (e.g., pertussis) or through recombinant DNA technology producing such antigens in yeast or mammalian cell cultures (e.g., hepatitis B), as well as conjugate vaccines that chemically bond "weak" antigens such as bacterial polysaccharides (complex sugars found in a "capsule" that surrounds a bacterium; they are usually specific to a bacterial serotype) to carrier proteins that yield a better, longer lasting immune response than is seen with the polysaccharide antigens alone (e.g., meningococcal and pneumococcal vaccines).

I removed this because I thought that it was too technical as well as too convoluted. There was also another paragraph that said almost exactly the same thing (in simpler language). After doing some research (to translate the above paragraph) I more or less combined the two. The second, "simple" paragraph was left almost intact with a few things from the above paragraph included.

Smallpox, for example, appears to have been completely eliminated in the wild.

This had already been stated earlier in the article

==Smallpox==

Vaccination against smallpox is an especially contentious issue. Dissenters suggest modern vaccines might result in developmental disorders, and suggest that infections in the past (as in the small vaccinia outbreak in England in 1961) were more lethal and/or were spread in greater proportion, among those who were vaccinated. They contend that improved sanitation and nutrition, not vaccine, account for most of the reduction in smallpox. Inoculation proponents dispute these allegations, while still recognizing the fact that the current vaccine has risks. As the current risk of the disease (barring germ warfare) is effectively zero, routine smallpox vaccination has not been recommended for many years.

I removed this because it veer's off topic. The article is about vaccines in general, not the small pox vaccine in particular.

The threat from smallpox as a biological weapon has, however, caused a reconsideration, though not a reversal, of this position. A 2003 US vaccination effort was unpopular. There was poor turnout among hospital staff who were designated to be the first to receive the vaccine. In addition to the known risks of the vaccine, several deaths were reported from cardiac causes among the immunized, suggesting that people with coronary artery disease might be at risk. Development of newer formulations that might avoid the newly discovered risks is underway. Illinois and New York suspended the program pending investigation of the apparent vaccine deaths of two healthcare workers (the main focus of the program). The California Nurses Association opposed the effort from the start.[2][3]

Again, I think this is too specific for a general article on vaccines. There is an article on the Smallpox vaccine, perhaps it could be incorporated there.

Vaccination against smallpox is an especially contentious issue. Dissenters suggest modern vaccines might result in developmental disorders, and suggest that infections in the past (as in the small vaccinia outbreak in England in 1961) were more lethal and/or were spread in greater proportion, among those who were vaccinated. They contend that improved sanitation and nutrition, not vaccine, account for most of the reduction in smallpox. Inoculation proponents dispute these allegations, while still recognizing the fact that the current vaccine has risks. As the current risk of the disease (barring germ warfare) is effectively zero, routine smallpox vaccination has not been recommended for many years. The possibility of smallpox being used as a biological weapon in the United States prompted the U.S. government to authorize the manufacture and injection of smallpox vaccine. Due to the number of deaths that resulted, the project has been discontinued.

With the exception of the last sentence (which I wrote trying to make the paragraph relevant) this paragraph is about vaccinations

The threat from smallpox as a biological weapon has, however, caused a reconsideration, though not a reversal, of this position. A 2003 US vaccination effort was unpopular. There was poor turnout among hospital staff who were designated to be the first to receive the vaccine. In addition to the known risks of the vaccine, several deaths were reported from cardiac causes among the immunized, suggesting that people with coronary artery disease might be at risk. Development of newer formulations that might avoid the newly discovered risks is underway. Illinois and New York suspended the program pending investigation of the apparent vaccine deaths of two healthcare workers (the main focus of the program). The California Nurses Association opposed the effort from the start.[4][5]

This is about the smallpox vaccine

Controversy'

Some groups in the United States claimed a link due to a preservative called thimerosal. Thimerosal is a preservative that contains mercury. It was (and in some cases still is) used in some DTP (diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis) vaccine formulations.

http://www.truthout.org/issues_05/032305EA.shtml%7C

under the 1997 FDA Modernization Act. In its report of October 1, 2001, the Institute of Medicine's (IOM) Immunization Safety Review Committee concluded that the evidence is inadequate to either accept or reject a causal relationship between thimerosal exposure from childhood vaccines and autism. In a further report, of May 2004 [6]

The reason why I removed this is because the 2004 report (mentioned in article) rendered this 2001 report moot.

A second, parallel, controversy arose in the United Kingdom over the vaccine for measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR), another vaccine that is routinely administered to children under the age of 2 in developed nations, but which contains no preservative. A possible link to autism came to the forefront when in 1998, Wakefield and colleagues reviewed reports of children with bowel symptoms and regressive developmental disorders, mostly autism, in a small sample of 12 children. The study was criticized for its small sample size, and for failing to use healthy controls. In 2004, 10 of the 13 authors of the original Wakefield study retracted the paper's interpretation, stating that the data were insufficient to establish a causal link between MMR vaccine and autism. This followed an investigation by Brian Deer for the London Sunday Times, who reported that Wakefield had links to lawyers hoping to sue the vaccines' manufacturers [7]. Further allegations were made by Deer in a UK television documentary, MMR: What They Didn't Tell You, first broadcast in November 2004 [8].

Since this said almost the same thing as the paragraph on the US's vaccine related controversy I more or less combined the two and did my best to make the end result more readable without changing the intent of either paragraph.

In response to the US and UK controversies, which closely mirror the framing of litigation in the two countries, a number of studies with large sample sizes were researched in many developed nations. These studies have sparked criticism over conflicts of interest, which has even been expressed by at least two Republican congressmen in the US, Dan Burton [9] and Dave Weldon[10]. The majority of those studies, funded primarily by pharmaceutical interests, showed no correlation between the use of vaccines (including the MMR vaccine) and increased autism: -

• "Thimerosal Exposure in Infants and Developmental Disorders: A Retrospective Cohort Study in the United Kingdom Does Not Support a Causal Association" PEDIATRICS Vol. 114 No. 3 September 2004
• "Age at First Measles-Mumps-Rubella Vaccination in Children With Autism and School-Matched Control Subjects: A Population-Based Study in Metropolitan Atlanta" PEDIATRICS Vol. 113 No. 2 February 2004
• "Thimerosal and the Occurrence of Autism: Negative Ecological Evidence From Danish Population-Based Data" PEDIATRICS Vol. 112 No. 3 September 2003 - This study shows an increase in autism after the discontinuation of the thimerosal formulations of the MMR vaccine in the Danish population.
• "An Epidemiological Study on Japanese Autism concerning Routine Childhood Immunization History" Jpn. J. Infect. Dis., 56, 114-117, 2003

reincorporated in a [more] neutral form and as a result, I removed this line: The study also garnered criticism for its small sample size, and for failing to use healthy controls. A couple of the links have been placed in the External links section as well.

The autism controversy highlights several issues pertaining to public health, biological science, ethical standards, and the medical community. First, it beckons greater attention to the value of large-scale, case-controlled scientific studies in proving or disproving a hypothesis (in this case, a link between autism and vaccines). Secondly, it demonstrates both the importance of medical professionals having the most solid and up-to-date information and the importance of communicating this information in a clear and unbiased fashion to patients. Thirdly, it suggests a possible need to change the role of the medical community, from authoritarian wardens to counselors who provide informed choices, which might influence evolution of the doctor-patient relationship to become more of a partnership. Lastly, it emphasizes how medical issues involve all aspects of modern culture and society, including the media, the affected families, and the scientific community at large.

Seriously POV, but I'm not enough of an expert to make it NPOV

External links

• BrianDeer.com - Brian Deer's denunciation of MMR study by Dr. Andrew Wakefield

- * NationalAutismAssociation.org - NAA library of pdf files

- * NIH.gov - National Intitutes of Health

- * RatBags.com - Anti-vaccination Liars

- *

- * whale.to - an Anti-vaccination website

Durability of inactivated vaccines

On Immune Central[11], the entry on inactivated vaccines states that:

However, most inactivated vaccines stimulate a relatively weak immune response and must be given more than once. A vaccine that requires several doses (boosters) has a limited usefulness, especially in areas where people have less access to regular health care.

So why did Geni see fit to take that caveat out? I'm putting it back in. --Leifern 18:13, 2005 Apr 15 (UTC)

The word "most"? You made an absolute statement. I know there are exceptions.Geni 18:17, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)

a) Most does not mean "all." B) Then edit the statement rather than take it out. --Leifern 18:20, 2005 Apr 15 (UTC)

Now I get it - "may" means "not necessarily" or "not always" which makes a statement such as "You may experience dizziness" equivalent to "some people will experience dizziness." Strictly speaking, "most people may experience dizziness" is a meaningless statement, since it implies that a minority of people definitely will not experience dizziness. But it's a common way to hedge, so I don't have any objections to the way it is now. --Leifern 18:48, 2005 Apr 15 (UTC)

Bowel Disorders

What were the bowel disorders that the Lancet article identified? Are we talking IBD, IBS or something else? Just curious. I recognize the issues surrounding that study, so no need to defend/attack the study. --Westendgirl 07:06, 21 July 2005 (UTC)

Vaccinia/Vacca

In the book "Vaccines: Are they really safe and effective?: A Parent's Guide to Childhood Shoots" by Neil Z. Miller, on page 17 it says

"The term "vaccine" is derived from "vacca," the Latin word for cow.

In wikipedia we say "The term derives from vaccinia, the infectious viral agent of cowpox". - (unsigned)

Both are correct, though our version, giving the closer derivation, is more informative. Vaccine, from French vaccin, from vaccine (cowpox) from New Latin vaccina (in variolae vaccinae = cowpox) from Latin, feminine of vaccinus, adjective, of or from cows, from vacca cow. - Nunh-huh 21:27, 12 September 2005 (UTC)

"How its made" section

Removed this section for lack of NPOV, unprofessional manner, non-specific language ("our..." instead of "the United States'..."):

==How its made==

It takes more than half a year for our antiquated system of producing flu vaccine to ramp up to develop a new vaccine. This is because flu vaccines are biological products, made fresh every year from eggs laid by real chickens. Yessiree, real chickens!

The actual process goes like this:

In late-February or early-March, the World Health Organization picks its three strains based on the virus going around. If it acts too soon, newly emerging strains can be missed, as in last year’s Fujian strain. By August, vaccine production begins on nearly 50 farms throughout Pennsylvania.

The Associated Press was allowed inside Aventis, America’s only flu shot manufacturer for a rare, firsthand look at the process of making flu vaccine. Here’s what the AP reported:

Egg laying starts in late-December, typically one a day. The fertilized eggs are collected and incubated for 7 to 12 days, and then brought to Aventis. A machine punches a tiny hole in each shell, and a needle inoculates the chick embryo with a single flu strain. The virus is allowed to multiply for about three days.

Then the eggs are broken, and the fluid around the embryo containing the virus is collected and purified. Formaldehyde is added to inactivate the flu virus, and the mixture is centrifuged to separate out the part containing the virus.

Once again, eggs are needed: A sample of the spun solution is put back in the eggs to see if any virus grows – a test to ensure the germ was inactivated. A few more processing steps turn it into a lot, or batch, of several hundred thousand doses of a single strain.

Next comes sterility testing. This was how Chiron’s vaccine was discovered to have been tainted with serratia bacteria. As Aventis tests for sterility, samples also go to the Food and Drug Administration, which begins testing late-May or early-June. After that, three viral strains are combined to form the trivalent vaccine. Four weeks of potency and sterility tests follow. Then, the vaccine is packaged into single-dose syringes and 10-dose vials. A few more quality checks for potency are made before the doses are shipped by the end of September.