Vaccines

Children who have been vaccinated against mumps are still getting the disease, say health officials in the US who are trying to understand the outbreak that has seen five times the usual number of cases occurring in the past year. Most of the cases have been restricted to the state of Washington, where there have been 367 confirmed cases, mostly among vaccinated children. But the sudden increase is also being seen across the US, with 5,300 cases reported in 2016 compared to the thousand or so cases in the previous year. Around 90 per cent of the children in Washington who’ve developed mumps were vaccinated, and had completed the recommended course, says Paul Throne, manager of the state’s immunization programme.

Mutated virus
Scientists reckon the virus may have mutated, and so the vaccine is no longer ‘locking’ into it. In any event, the MMR (measles-mumps-rubella) vaccine is only 88 per cent effective against the disease. One problem is that doctors in the state don’t know how to treat the disease as they’ve not seen any cases before.

Mumps spreads through droplets of water, or by sharing food and drink with an infected person. Infected people can spread the disease seven days before they show any symptoms, and for eight days after. It can cause swelling of the salivary glands, along with fever, headache and tiredness. In rare cases, it can lead to meningitis.

Source: ABC News, February 7, 2017

Vaccines such as the MMR (measles-mumps-rubella), and especially the annual flu shot, are linked to a range of neuro-psychiatric conditions, such as obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), ADHD, bipolar and major depression, a new study has discovered. Although the researchers say they can’t establish a direct cause-and-effect association, the problems are happening within days and weeks after vaccination.

Flu shot linked to many diseases
The researchers tracked the vaccine history of children aged between six and 15 who had been diagnosed with a neuro-psychiatric condition. They were then matched against similar children who didn’t have any of the problems. The strongest link was found in cases of anorexia, where 21 per cent of cases had had a vaccination in the six months leading up to the diagnosis, followed by OCD and nervous tics, where 16 per cent of cases had recently been vaccinated. Although the MMR was one of the vaccines the children had been given, [highlight]the problems were more likely to occur after a flu shot[/highlight], a vaccine that still uses thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative. The researchers from Pennsylvania State University college of medicine say their findings are in line with those from other countries that found that people given the H1N1 flu shot were more likely to develop narcolepsy, the sleeping disorder.

They suspect that [highlight]vaccines, and flu shots in particular, are affecting the immune system, which influences brain development[/highlight]. All the problems they were witnessing could be categorised as auto-immune disorders, they say.

Source: Frontiers in Psychiatry, 2017, doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2017.00003