Coincidentally I was last weekend talking to a family friend whose entire family had just had whooping cough. But worse, one of the children had most likely infected her teacher and her teacher’s new born baby caught it and died.
What was worrying is that all of them had had the whooping cough vaccine including the teacher, but not the new baby.
Now this is seems really unusual, but it also seems that the whooping cough vaccine is not that effective and protection drops rapidly with time.
I have no problems at all with vaccines and my entire family has gone through the standard regimes. I’ve even had a smallpox vaccine. I also have a sister-in law that` caught one of the last cases of Polio in the country so I am especially aware of the need for vaccines.
My supplementary question is whether vaccines are as good as they are made out, or we are living in a false sense of security
The short answer is that Whooping Cough (most doctors call it Pertussis now) is bacterial, not viral, and because of that the Pertussis vaccine does not convey lifelong immunity like many other vaccines do.
This is also true for Tetnus and Diphtheria, also bacterial, which is why those three vaccines are usually mixed into a multi-vaccine called Tdap, given on a strict schedule for babies, and ideally every ten years or so for adults. Pregnant women are strongly encouraged to get a dose with every pregnancy, because pertussis is extremely dangerous to developing fetuses.
Compare that to vaccines for things like Polio and Measles. Those are viruses, and very stable ones at that — they don’t tend to mutate quickly the way Influenza or the Cold virus does, a couple of doses early in life usually conveys a lifelong immunity.
So if you haven’t gotten a Tdap booster shot lately you might want to go ahead and get one — those diseases may not be incredibly dangerous to you as an adult, but they are deadly to unborn fetuses and young babies.
Protective antibody levels following pertussis vaccination do decline over time, and how to prolong protection (whether through booster shots and/or an improved vaccine) is under study. Regardless, the vaccine does work, and keeps most recipients (especially in the particularly vulnerable age groups) protected.
*"Studies show childhood whooping cough vaccines are effective
In general, DTaP vaccination is effective for up to 8 or 9 out of 10 children who receive it, but protection fades over time.
Since the childhood whooping cough vaccine (called DTaP) has been used since the 1990s and almost every child gets it, we have study results on long-term protection. In general, DTaP vaccines are effective for 8 or 9 out of 10 children who receive them. Among children who get all 5 doses of DTaP vaccine on schedule, effectiveness is very high within the year following the 5th dose — nearly all children (98 out of 100) are fully protected. There is a modest decrease in effectiveness in each following year. About 7 out of 10 of children are fully protected 5 years after getting their last dose of DTaP vaccine and the other 3 are protected against serious disease."*
Yes they are, and no, we are not.
Check out the chart showing pre and post-vaccine disease statistics at this site. That should convince you of the value of immunization.
Thank you. And for those skeptics who might not believe that cite, check out this one from the Department of Health and Human Services.
In a nutshell: the mortality rate for children age 1-4 has dropped from nearly 450/100,000 in 1935 to about 29/100,000 in 2007, while the death rate for children age 5-14 dropped from about 150/100,000 to about 15/100,000 in the same period.
Granted, improved sanitation, nutrition and injury treatments accounted for some of that reduction, but the reduction of death from disease was a huge factor, as well.
Because of this problem, they’ve dropped the minimum age for WC vaccination, and (where I am) are encouraging revaccination for parents and people working with the elderly.
Both I and my wife had the vaccination again when she was pregnant – vaccination in pregnancy gives some protection for the kid between birth and first vaccination at 6-8 weeks.
No vaccine is 100% effective. Many may only be as little as 80% (i.e. out of 100 vaccinated people, 20 might catch the disease if all are exposed). However the effects of the disease are less and the risks of permanent damage significantly reduced.
One important thing to remember is that having the disease does not render you necessarily immune either. It is possible - though rare - to catch measles twice.
However if everyone who can be, is vaccinated, then herd immunity creates a barrier that impedes the spread of the disease and reduces its effects on those that do catch it.
Controversy regarding mercury/aluminum in vaccines or vaccination schedules aside, the research, statistics and
results of the court case referenced in this article, would certainly seem to raise some questions to the overall historical
efficacy of certain vaccines in general. Just thought you might be interested in reading -
Xdelray, I read that article on Collective Evolution and it’s rather disingenuous.
It begins with a headline “The Doctor Who Beat The British General Medical Council By Proving That Vaccines Aren’t Necessary To Achieve Health”. That’s simply untrue. Dr Donegan was charged with gross misconduct because the GMC believed that she was acting from a position whereby she was allowing her views and opinions to over-ride research and evidence when advising her patients. During the proceedings at no point did she prove to the panel that vaccines aren’t necessary. She wasn’t asked to. This wasn’t a case of her opinions being put to the test, but rather that she was acting on them in defiance on all research and evidence. She successfully demonstrated to the GMC that she was not acting based solely on her opinions and beliefs.
The article also contains a sub-heading “GMC Agreed: Children Do Not Need Vaccines To Be Healthy”. This is also at odds with fact, for the same reasons as outlined above.
On Jane Donegan’s own website she sets out her opinions and research and they are not in accord with what Collective Evolution are claiming. I’m going to quote a section from a letter she wrote to What Doctors Don’t Tell You after they misquoted her and made up whole tranches of information that they claimed were obtained from her report on vaccination.
So as we can see, Dr Donegan does not oppose vaccination outright. Indeed she fully supports vaccination in some circumstances and opposes it in others - if parents are willing to go through the effort of alternatives (eg tending a sick child through a measles infection).
Her website goes into considerable detail on the GMC case and it does not support the summaries that the Collective Evolution article makes. The Collective Evolution article is dangerously misleading and seeks to distort the story of Dr Donegan to fit their preconceived ideas - which rather ironically, is what she was charged with by the GMC in the first place.
You can judge the quality of the Collective Evolution site from some of their other articles, such as the one about a new over-unity power generator (250% efficient!) and its reporting of a gel fridge as fact when it’s just a design mockup without even a prototype, not to mention their article about how HIV is not spread through unprotected sex. It’s a nonsense site that believes in everything.
What the CDC fails to mention is that the current acellular pertussis (DTaP) vaccine is far less effective than the whole-cell pertussis (DTwP) vaccine given to infants until the 1990s.
*"Pertussis vaccines are effective, but not perfect. They typically offer high levels of protection within the first 2 years of getting vaccinated, but then protection decreases over time. This is known as waning immunity. Similarly, natural infection may also only protect you for a few years.
In general, DTaP vaccines are 80-90% effective. Among kids who get all 5 doses of DTaP on schedule, effectiveness is very high within the year following the 5th dose – at least 9 out of 10 kids are fully protected. There is a modest decrease in effectiveness in each following year. About 7 out of 10 kids are fully protected 5 years after getting their last dose of DTaP and the other 3 out of 10 kids are partially protected – protecting against serious disease…
When it comes to waning immunity, it seems that the acellular pertussis vaccine (DTaP) we use now may not protect for as long as the whole cell vaccine (DTP) we used to use."*
It’s a tradeoff - fewer rare but potentially serious complications from the vaccine, but less long-lived immunity, necessitating recommendations for a booster shot later in life.
By the way, Collective Evolution has an article up explaining why measles is “nothing” to be scared of - citing episodes of The Flintstones and The Brady Bunch in support of this belief.
As the OP I’ll just mention that Innoculation (technical term) was used as a weapon of war.
The practice was to innoculate (with smallpox) prisoners of war and release them to their respective armies. They were highly infectious in the first week or so before the innoculation took effect.
I have the vague idea various live vaccines in later times had the same infectious ability.
I had a very mild case of pertussis shortly after one of my boosters. My mother thought at the time it was a reaction to the shot (but being old enough to know what real pertussis looked like, it didn’t put her off vaccines); I know enough now to know that I was probably exposed to pertussis when I went to the doctor for my booster, and got an attenuated case because of my shots, otherwise, I might have been in for weeks of misery. As it was, it lasted about 36 hours, and I don’t think was ever as severe as the real thing, but it was awful. The cough was irresistible, even with cough suppressants. I was only about three, but my memory is vivid.
I never knew how often adults needed boosters until I was pregnant in 2006. I had gotten lucky and stumbled into them because of foreign travel requirements, or the military, so I was always up-to-date. Now I know I’m due for one soon.
The family shouldn’t feel guilty. They could have a genetic inability to hold a titer, or they could have all gotten a batch of expired vaccine that conferred only partial immunity. If they weren’t vaccinated, then yeah, they put that baby in danger, but if they all were vaccinated, and either something was wrong with the vaccine, or they encountered a mutated strain, that’s just bad luck, but not typical. It’s very sad, but beyond vaccinating, and isolating as soon as you know you are sick (which often misses the period of greatest infectiousness), there’s not much else you can do.
Note, only one “n”, it’s not related to “innocuous”, it’s related to a gardening term for grafting buds, meaning “in the eye”, Latin “in-occulus”.
Smallpox prevention began hundreds of years before vaccination, with the use of actual smallpox pustules blown up the nose. This was called inoculation or *variolation *(because smallpox is variola). Jenner’s breakthrough was to use cowpox material instead, and inject it into the skin. This he called *vaccination *(because cowpox is variola vaccinae) to differentiate it from variolation. That’s first found in print in 1800, by Jenner’s friend Richard Dunning. Jenner always insisted that Dunning be given credit for the term vaccination. Technically, both are forms of inoculation… but then so is moving a bacteria or viruses from one test tube to another. Any time you are purposefully moving a bacteria or virus, you are inoculating the test tube/petri dish/person you’re moving it to.
Pasteur rightly thought this was all too confusing, and in 1891 suggested we start using vaccination to refer to using bacteria and viruses to prevent their own illnesses, period. He included the newer techniques and other infectious agents. He’d recently developed a rabies vaccine and also the first laboratory-developed vaccine: the vaccine for chicken cholera, and stumbled upon the technique of attenuation because of a big ol’ mistake in the process. Since that time, vaccination is the more accepted term.
So these days, even when we blow attenuated viruses up the nose, like the nasal flu vaccine does, we still call it vaccination.
The practice of blowing infected matter up a person’s nose to induce (hopefully) a mild case of smallpox followed by protective immunity seems to mostly have been confined to Eastern countries (i.e. China). The typical inoculation practiced in the Western world prior to Jenner’s cowpox vaccination was to use infected matter (i.e. from a pustule) rubbed into a scratch on the arm or leg, or inserted subcutaneously.
A risky procedure, but nothing compared to the 30% risk of dying after contracting smallpox (i.e. Variola major).
My Mom is still running around in her 80’s and just can’t fathom why folks would be willing to throw their kids under the bus, literally, because of anecdotal evidence disguised as bad science. She’s had plenty of hands-on experience.
Starting with whooping cough as a toddler in the 1930s scared my Grandma (a newly minted immigrant from Germany) and was willing to do anything to avoid that harrowing experience again, and ensured the rest of her offspring got the shots.
Later, as my Mom worked to obtain her RN license, she got a gig at Willard Parker in New York City in 1951. This hospital dealt with communicable diseases of the era (it has, AFAIK, been closed). She did the night shift in the measles ward, other floors dealt with polio, mumps, whooping cough, etc. Death from complications was somewhat common, since this was for the most serious cases. There was no ICU to speak of, other than an IV and an oxygen tent; and no A/C! People forget just how little technology was available back then.
She’s not the most assertive person, but when somebody pipes about not vaccinating their kids, she mentions what it was like to treat measles patients. Folks immediately become very uncomfortable because this isn’t what they want to hear. And then when she mentions that some folks can’t get immunizations because of medical conditions (e. g., chemotherapy), their faces light up, figuring that she’s now being polite by giving them an excuse for not immunizing their kids, but then get really uncomfortable because she’s pointing out that they’re really being selfish towards those with compromise immune systems. That’s generally when they change the subject.
Too bad, because watching a kid(s) die in 1951 is just as brutal as it is in 2015.
So, inoculation means “a shot in the eye” :eek: while vaccination means “a shot [of or from] the cow”. In just another two or three years, I’ll be due for my decennial DTaP (or TDap?) cow shot.
This discussion is leaving me confused about just how long the immunity lasts, which leaves me confused about how often boosters are needed. Various posts above say pertussis immunity fades after 3? 7? whatever? years. Is a booster once every 10 years enough? I’ve been getting one every 10 years for 40 years now. So far I haven’t been infected by any cows.
What is the difference between dtap, tdap, or whatever other permutations?
So what about adults and children over 64? We get our pneumonococcus shots, we get our shingles shot. Don’t we get to have tetanus, diphtheria, and whooping crane protection any more?
So what about adults and children over 64? We get our pneumonococcus shots, we get our shingles shot. Don’t we get to have tetanus, diphtheria, and whooping crane protection any more?