Use of smallpox vaccine may be problematic
By Anita Manning, USA TODAY
The USA is amassing an abundant supply of smallpox vaccine, but health officials say they are not recommending that it be widely used — yet.
The vaccine currently on hand, 15.4 million doses in a government stockpile and more than 85 million doses that drug maker Aventis Pasteur says it will add to that, is safe and effective but can cause problems, says D.A. Henderson, director of the Office of Public Health Preparedness. Many people develop painful swelling around the site of the inoculation, headache and nausea. In people with weakened immune systems, the live-virus vaccine can cause illness. And in one to two people per million, it can cause death.
"When smallpox was around," Henderson says, "the risk was so great, with a 30% death rate, we were prepared to accept a level of complications from the vaccine." false information given to the public...AGAIN!!!!
Myth #3: The Death Rate From Smallpox Is 30%
Nearly every newspaper and journal article quotes this statistic. However, as pointed out in the presentation by Dr. Tom Mack, it appears that the “30% fatality rate” has come from skewed data. Dr. Mack has worked with smallpox extensively and saw more than 120 outbreaks in Pakistan throughout the early 1970s.
Villages would apparently have “an importation” every 5-10 years, regardless of vaccination status, and the outbreak could always be predicated by living conditions and social arrangements. There were many small outbreaks and individual cases that never came to the attention of the local authorities.
Mack stated that even with poor medical care, the case fatality rate in adults was “much lower than is generally advertised” and thought to be 10-15%. He said that the statistics were “loaded with children that had a much higher fatality,” making the average death rate reported to be much higher. Amazingly, he revealed his opinion that even without mass vaccination, “smallpox would have died out anyway. It just would have taken longer.”
Even so, people died. Why? After all, smallpox is a skin disease and “other organs are seldom involved.”[6] I posed this question to the committee on two separate occasions.
Kathi Williams of the National Vaccine Information Center asked this question at the Institute of Medicine meeting on June 15th. On June 20, an answer was finally forthcoming when a member of the ACIP committee said, “That is a good question. Does anyone know the actual cause of death from smallpox?”
At that point, Dr. D.A. Henderson, from the John Hopkins University Department of Epidemiology volunteered a comment. Dr. Henderson directed the World Health Organization's global smallpox eradication campaign (1966-1977) and helped initiate WHO's global program of immunization in 1974. He approached the microphone and stated,
“Well, it appears that the cause of death of smallpox is a ‘mystery.’”
He stated that a medical resident had been asked to do a complete review of the literature and “not much information” was found. It is postulated that the people died from a “generalized toxemia” and that those with the most severe forms of smallpox -- the hemorrhagic or confluent malignant types -- died of complications of skin sloughing, similar to a burn. However, he concluded by saying, “it’s frustrating, because we don’t really know.”
Comment: I find this to be extremely frightening. If we knew why people died when they contracted smallpox, perhaps current medical technology could treat the complications, making the death rate much lower. Considering that the last known case of smallpox in the U.S. was in Texas in 1949, continuing to report that smallpox has a 30% death rate is similar to saying that all heart attacks are fatal. Based on 1949 technology, that would be accurate reporting. But in 2002, all heart attacks are NOT fatal. Neither would smallpox have a mortality rate of 30%.
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