Pearls before swine flu
The Daily Mail is a UK newspaper that has a tendency, oh, every so often, of printing articles that sometimes don’t exactly represent reality.
This is one such article. It links vaccinations for the swine flu to a neurological disorder called Guillaine-Barré Syndrome, or GBS. The article inflates the danger from vaccinations and may scare people into not getting their inoculations.
And you know how I feel about that.
Happily, a real doctor, my friend and fellow SkepticBlogger Steve Novella tears this apart in exquisite detail. Basically, GBS is an illness where a persons’s immune system attacks the myelin protein sheath covering nerves. This can lead to nerve damage and other problems, as it did in the swine flu outbreak in 1976. However, in general, if caught early it can be treated and the patient can expect a nearly complete recovery.
Why are vaccinations involved? As Dr. Novella says,
GBS can not only be triggered by the flu or other infections, but also by vaccines used to prevent infections. This is because vaccines are designed to stimulate the immune system, to provoke an immune response – which is what causes GBS. The risk of getting GBS from the flu vaccine is about 1 in a million. This is very reliable data, as we have been using the same basic technology for the flu vaccine for decades and we have reliable statistics on GBS as treatment requires hospitalization. Some cases may be missed if they are very mild (probably rare, but also if a case is too mild to be recognized then who cares) or from misdiagnosis (also probably rare as it is fairly easy to eventually confirm the diagnosis even if it may be difficult initially).
So yes, vaccinations can in fact trigger GBS. However, this is nothing new, despite the breathless Daily Mail article. It’s been known for years and doctors are trained to keep an eye out for it.
And how big a risk is this?
So the risks from the vaccine may vary slightly as new strains are being targeted, but over the last 30 years since the 1976 episode the risk of GBS has been steady at about 1 in a million – far less than the risk of the flu itself.
Therefore the accusation that the upcoming H1N1 flu vaccine is untested is not a fair or accurate statement. It is highly tested.
So the antivax crew going around with their heads on fire screaming about the swine flu vaccine are, as usual, wrong, and presenting incredibly distorted "information". When you encounter anything the antivax people say, you really need to dig deeper than the info they give you. Like Apollo deniers and all the other antiscience crowd, they distort reality and don’t tell you everything you need to know to understand the actual situation.
Does medical science know everything? No, of course not. But it sure knows a whole lot more than the antivaxxers do. As Dr. Novella says:
The risk of GBS from the flu vaccine has been around 1 in a million – a very rare complication. The risk may not be any higher for the H1N1 vaccine. It is actually not known why the 1976 vaccine had a higher rate of GBS, but it has not been repeated in the last 30 years. Perhaps there is something about H1N1 that increases the risk of GBS, and for this reason monitoring GBS as the vaccine is administered is reasonable. So far, in preliminary tests of thousand of individuals with the new vaccine there has not been any increased risk of GBS, but this process in ongoing.
There are no absolute guarantees in medicine – but the best evidence we have to date strongly suggests that the risk of the H1N1 flu is likely to be much greater than the risk of the vaccine itself.
That’s something to always remember: despite the garbage conspiracy theory-toting antivaxxers are purveying, diseases tend to be a lot more dangerous than vaccination. Talk to your doctor, read what Steve Novella has to say, and get the real scoop on vaccination.
I challenge anyone to read the comments on the Daily Mail article without getting a headache from the stupid.
I challenge anyone to read the article.
I love the scaremongering over a hydrocarbon (not enzyme) that your body produces on its own (for some of us, too well… I have high cholesterol).
Let’s take that logic even further. If your body produces squalene on its own, there’s no need to add it to the vaccine!
Man, they should fire that scaremongering Dr. Tom Jefferson, and hire us to co-ordinate the vaccines section of the influential Cochrane Collaboration.
R..i..g..h..t….. like the amount in a vaccine is equivalent to the stuff my liver manufactures.
If they claimed Dr. Jefferson claimed squalene was an enzyme: either he should not be in medicine, or the journalist did not quote him properly.
Any way, here is some more information on squalene, showing how valid some of that information is:
One in a million chance? Does that mean that in a population of 300,000,000 (assuming they all got the vaccine) it’s likely that 300 of them will get GBS. Still, if the chance is higher from catching the flu itself, it’s well worth the risk.
But be prepared for the anti-vaccination folks to latch on to those few cases and trumpet them to a public that doesn’t understand probability.
So the risk of GBS from the seasonal flu vaccine is 1 in a million, but the incidence of GBS from the 1976 swine flu vaccine was 10 in a million, and no one knows why. Wasn’t the 1976 vaccine tested? Did those tests show a tenfold increase in GBS risk? How do we know it won’t be a hundredfold this time?
Is the risk of GBS from the flu itself bigger than the risk of GBS from the flu vaccine?
That’s what they say about melanoma and testicular cancer.
By “tenfold increase” I didn’t mean to imply that there was a seasonal flu vaccine before 1976.
Oh dear I can just see a lot of the woos holding up the news paper and saying “See I told you so !”
What drives me nuts is peoples reactions to the reports of Swine flu deaths like its some kind of huge loss of life, (not that any deaths aren’t tragic)But how many people die every year from the “regular”flu? Is the Swine Flu killing that many more?
Thats a question I want to know the answer to .
Each year, seasonal flu infects about 1 in 10 people, and kills about 1 in 1000 infected people, which comes out to about 30,000 Americans, mostly children and the elderly.
The CDC expected swine flu to infect 3-4 in 10 people, and it’s been killing about 8 in 1000 confirmed cases. Assuming that the confirmed cases are more sick than average, the actual case fatality is probably smaller, say 3 in 1000. That comes out to about 315,000 Americans, possibly mostly adults, on top of the 30,000 from seasonal flu.
Is there a vaccination against woo? I’d settle for the nicotine patch equivalent.
No, but I think there is a homeopathic remedy. One molecule of BS diluted in one million molecules water. Or maybe its the other way around, I can’t remember.
how to do a little fly large elephant? very easy! write about the swine flu! but the problem is actually not. I say so because my 5 friends cured of swine flu in 1 week its pills
The English idiom is “make a mountain out of a molehill.”
How did your friends get Tamiflu, how long did they wait to get it, and what country was this in?
All your base are belong to us!
Huh?
I follow your blog for quite a long time and should tell that your articles always prove to be of a high value and quality for readers.
I had the “alternate” Swine Flu Vaccine in the ’70’s, due to some medical condition. Then I got GBS. It was 27 years later, but it was indeed “after”, right?
Seriously, I do see ample room for hidden correlations that can skew statistics. For example, people got the alternate shots _because_ they had some kind of autoimmune issues already.