Flu vaccine racket Swine flu vaccine Australia
Australian tots falling ill after flu jabs
Apr 23, 2010, 10:59 GMT http://www.monstersandcritics.com/news/health/news/article_1550429.php/Australian-tots-falling-ill-after-flu-jabs
Sydney - Australian doctors Friday were ordered to stop giving children under 5 seasonal flu vaccine after some were hospitalized with convulsions and dozens displayed adverse reactions to the jabs.
A mother in Perth said three hours after her 3-year-old daughter and her 1-year-old twins were vaccinated, the trio became ill.
'My 3-year-old started shaking,' the woman told local radio. 'She went purple and she was trembling and she couldn't stop.'
Australian National University infectious diseases specialist Peter Collignon said that this year's vaccine incorporated a swine-flu dose and that children might be reacting badly to that.
'If you were infected with swine flu itself last year, or had been given the swine flu vaccine last November or December or January, if you then get exposed again to a part of the virus, you've already got antibodies and white cells that are turned on to try to fight the virus,' Collignon told public broadcaster ABC.
'Therefore if you get exposed to it again, you may have a brisk reaction where you produce more antibodies and more white cells, which gives you a fever and an inflammatory reaction.'
Collignon said vaccinating millions of Australians might do more harm than good.
'If you're in a risk group, everybody agrees you need to be vaccinated, but the majority of the population don't have risk factors, including children, and before we roll out a vaccine to millions of people, in my view, we need to do studies of thousands of people over a period of time to make sure we are always going to do more good than harm with the vaccine.'
Professor Collignon said that last southern hemisphere winter the risk of those under 40 dying from swine flu was less than one in a million.
'You have to start weighing this up because you may actually produce as much influenza-like illness with a vaccine as you prevent with people not getting influenza,' he said. 'That's been my concern about rolling out this vaccine to the entire population. I don't think we've got enough data to know how effective it's going to be.'
Updated
Australian doctors have been warned not to give the seasonal flu vaccine to children under the age of five, after a child fell critically ill and dozens more suffered serious adverse reactions after receiving the vaccine in Western Australia.
Other states, including Queensland and South Australia, are also reporting incidents of children being hospitalised and having adverse reactions such as fevers and convulsions.
Queensland Health says three children have been hospitalised and 41 have had adverse reactions, but only 15 of those cases were children under the age of five.
A West Australian mum who had her three-year-old daughter and her one-year-old twins vaccinated two weeks ago told ABC Local Radio in Perth that things started to go wrong just three hours after her children had their flu shots.
"My three-year-old started shaking. She went purple and she was trembling and she couldn't stop, so I rushed her down to Margaret Hospital," she said.
"While I was at the hospital I got a phone call from my husband saying the twins were vomiting and were very sick so I've raced home to them."
Peter Collignon, a professor in infectious diseases from the Australian National University, says the seasonal flu vaccine has three components - one of which is swine flu - and children may be reacting badly to receiving a second exposure to part of the flu virus.
"If you were infected with swine flu itself last year or had been given the swine flu vaccine last November or December or January, if you then get exposed again to a part of the virus, you've already got antibodies and white cells that are turned on to try to fight the virus," he said.
"Therefore if you get exposed to it again you may have a brisk reaction, where you produce more antibodies and more white cells, which gives you a fever and an inflammatory reaction.
"So one of the possibilities is that the children who have problems is because they already had immunity to the virus and therefore are over reacting when exposed again to some of the virus."
Professor Collignon says health authorities need to better weigh up whether rolling out a vaccination to millions of people around the country will cause more harm than good.
"If you're in a risk group everybody agrees you need to be vaccinated," he said.
"But the majority of the population don't have risk factors, including children, and before we roll out a vaccine to millions of people, in my view, we need to do studies of thousands of people over a period of time to make sure we are always going to do more good than harm with the vaccine."
Professor Collignon says about 20 per cent of Australian children who received the swine flu vaccine had moderate to severe side effects in the form of a fever of more than 38.5 degrees Celsius and severe muscle aches and pains.
But he says last winter, the risk of someone under the age of 40 getting swine flu and dying from it if they had no risk factors was less than one in a million.
"You have to start weighing this up because you may actually produce as much influenza-like illness with a vaccine as you prevent with people not getting influenza," he said.
"That's been my concern about rolling out this vaccine to the entire population. I don't think we've got enough data to know how effective it's going to be."
He says Australia should take note of vaccination research carried out in other countries.
"In Canada, they found to everybody's surprise that people who had been injected with the seasonal flu vaccine in 2008/2009 had twice the risk of getting swine flu if they were under the age of 50," he said.
"That's also happened in San Diego.
"So I actually think whenever we're doing a vaccine that is given on a yearly basis that's involving millions of people, we do need to have a good ongoing surveillance system."
Professor Collignon says an effective surveillance system should monitor thousands of people for one or two weeks after vaccination before rolling out the vaccine to the entire population.
And he says such a system would be relatively inexpensive.
"We need a better system than voluntary notification to the TGA [Therapeutic Goods Administration] that there's a problem," he said.
"Because whenever you do that you really underestimate how much of a problem there is.
"If we are going to roll out vaccines to entire populations I think there is an onus on us to at least check in a number of thousands of people before we roll it out to millions of people."
Earlier, Australia's chief medical officer, Professor Jim Bishop, said authorities were trying to work out whether the problems were with a particular batch of the influenza vaccine.
He said discussions were underway with the manufacturers.
The Australian Medical Association has backed the move to suspend vaccinations in children under five around the country, but says parents should not lose confidence about vaccinating their children.