I recently had the Meningococcal C injection to prevent the desese. I know that the desese is very, very rare, but if you do catch it you will most likely die. Yet I was reading the information sheet, and it said that there is a chance of dying from the injection and I was wondering, if there is more chance of dying from the injection then the actual desese?
Short answer no.
Long answer NO.
Public health doctors don’t just vaccinate people for fun, they work out all the probabilities, and if you are more likely to die from the vaccine than the disease, they wouldn’t vaccinate people.
Be glad you’ve had the vaccine, meningococcal meningitis is not something you want to get. Ever.
Unfortunately the vaccine doesn’t prevent the B strain of meningococcal meningitis, or protect you from other causes of meningitis like Haemophilus influenza or Streptococcus pneumoniae infections.
This means that even if you have had the vaccine, if you get signs or symptoms of meningitis you should still seek medical help pronto, make sure to tell them you have had the vaccine, so they can exclude Men C as a cause.
Those signs would be:
Severe headache
Neck stiffness or soreness
Photophobia (light hurts your eyes)
Confusion or disorientation
Fever
Vomiting
or
a purple/red rash which doesn’t fade when you press it with a glass (this means the infection is in your blood and is an emergency).
You might have all of the signs, or only a few. The sooner they catch it, the better your chances.