UK: Chickenpox jab for all children and pregnant women

[Guest guest]

Isn't it amazing that inocuous illnesses suddenly become killers once a

vaccine is available? The lunatics are truly running the asylum!!

http://www.dailymail.co

uk/health/article-1104555/Chickenpox-jab-children-pregnant-women.html

Chickenpox jab for all children and pregnant women

By Fiona Macrae

Last updated at 2:07 AM on 03rd January 2009

The government is considering combining the chickenpox jab with the MMR

triple vaccine

Children and pregnant women could be routinely vaccinated against chickenpox

Options being considered by government advisers include combining the jab

with the MMR triple vaccine, creating a four-in-one shot.

The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation is also considering

vaccinating adults against shingles, which is caused by the same virus.

Recommendations made by the expert panel of doctors, nurses and scientists

are almost always turned into health policy.

Child health specialists say mass vaccination is the best defence against

chickenpox, which claims to up to 50 lives a year, 40 of them children.

But critics fear the vaccination will overload the immune systems of infants

who are already given 25 vaccines in ten shots by the age of 13 months.

There are around 300,000 cases of chickenpox a year in the UK. Most people

make a full recovery but several hundred will suffer complications such as

pneumonia, blood poisoning and infection by flesh-eating bacteria.

Adults, very young babies and pregnant women are at particular risk of

complications, with babies exposed to chickenpox in the womb at risk of

brain damage or blindness.

Children are already routinely vaccinated against chickenpox in the U.S.,

Australia and Germany, and Irish guidelines advise that pregnant women be

given the jab if they are not immune.

A chickenpox sub-group of the JCVI will meet to discuss the issue in March.

The vaccine costs around £30 a shot, so the cost effectiveness will be

considered, as will the drug's safety.

Official papers show the JCVI is also considering vaccinating pregnant women

who are not immune to the disease.

Professor Adam Finn, a expert on child health and vaccination, said: 'In 999

cases out of 1,000, chickenpox is a trivial illness but that's not the point

'What we can't do is predict the children who are going to die from it or

get quite seriously ill and end up in hospital.

'If you want to prevent the deaths, the only way to do that is to immunise

everybody.'

Professor Finn, a paediatrician at Bristol University's medical school,

predicted that mass immunisation could be introduced within five years.

There are concerns that vaccinating children could lead to a surge of

shingles among adults. Shingles, which causes ongoing pain, develops when a

chickenpox germ which has lain in the body for many years reactivates.

Cases of chickenpox among children are thought to boost adults' immune

systems and prevent shingles from developing.

Vaccinating against shingles could sidestep the problem.

But London GP Halvorsen, author of The Truth About Vaccines, said:

'Shingles is much more of a health issue than chickenpox. So we are potentially

making a very small problem a little bit less and making a big problem that much

bigger.'