WWII contaminated vaccine

[Guest guest]

From the National Institutes of Health website; one could title this "Proof of Harm." My father was one of the soldiers who contracted hepatitis from his yellow fever vaccine. He never told us his hepatitis came from the vaccine; soldiers may have been told the infection was food-borne. I only learned about it by reading the recent book "Vaccine A" by Matsumoto.

HokkanenMinneapolis

http://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/LW/Views/Exhibit/narrative/disease.html

"After the U.S. entered the war in late 1941, the army started vaccinating all troops, not just those headed to tropical areas. By early April 1942, the IHD had furnished seven million doses to the U.S. Army and Navy, British forces in Africa, and others. In March, however, many cases of hepatitis--mostly mild--were being reported in American troops especially in California. Sawyer and Bauer went out to investigate, and within a month the evidence pointed to infection from nine specific lots of vaccine. These, in turn were traced to 2 percent of the blood donors, who had histories of hepatitis but no symptoms at the time they gave the blood. The level of production had required a much larger pool of blood donors for the serum, and no one had checked on their medical histories.

"At Sawyer's direction, the IHD converted to serum-free vaccine production by June of 1942, but in the end there were still over 49,000 cases of vaccine-related hepatitis that year, 84 of them fatal."