What we truly need is an effective simple test for the bacteria itself. The vaccine has always been problematic to start with. Now the disease is way more persuasive than ever and we have no clear way to rid ourselves of it.
I was vaccinated when i was twelve years old for this disease. Problem was that i was already symptomatic. This led to double pneumonia and sixty lost school days during the dead of winter after a close brush with death. The antibiotics did work just in time.
We need to routinely test for the live presence of the bacteria and to rout it out to prevent additional infection. That is actually a major well funded program that is easily justified.
Reno County Health Department says the majority of whooping cough cases were found in vaccinated individuals
(NaturalNews) A majority of the people coming down with whooping cough
in Reno County, Kansas, were vaccinated against the disease, according
to the county's health department. A spokesperson for Hutchinson Schools
took it further, noting that every case he had seen was in a vaccinated
child.
Reno County is in the midst of an outbreak of whooping
cough, also known as pertussis. As of July 31, there had been 41 cases
considered confirmed or probable and more than 70 suspected cases.
There
were about 200 confirmed or probable cases statewide.
The Kansas
outbreak is not the first to occur primarily among vaccinated people.
In other recent outbreaks, including the one in Falmouth, Cape Cod,
Massachusetts, nearly all of those who fell ill had received the
pertussis vaccine.
Vaccine does not prevent infection
Increasingly, research has demonstrated that pertussis rates are actually on the rise due to a weakness in the vaccine itself.
Before
1991, the pertussis vaccine was made from killed bacteria. The rates of
severe side effects from this vaccine, including brain inflammation and
convulsions, were considered unacceptably high, so the vaccine was
reformulated in 1991. This new, "acellular" vaccine does not contain any
bacterial bodies. However, while the old vaccine was about 90 percent
effective, the new vaccine was initially believed to prevent infection
in only 80 percent of people. According to a study published in the
journal PLOS Computational Biology in April, this change in effectiveness is enough on its own to explain recent changes in pertussis rates.
Recent
research has shown that the effectiveness of the pertussis vaccine is
actually far, far lower than 80 percent. According to Tod Merkel of the
FDA, it has now become clear that the vaccine
does almost nothing to prevent the spread of whooping cough. Although
it does seem to prevent about 80 percent of people from showing symptoms
of the disease, it does not prevent them from catching it or spreading
it.
Vaccine has increased pertussis danger
What does the
pertussis vaccine actually do? According to Merkel, it causes people who
contract pertussis to either not show symptoms or show milder ones than
usual. Paradoxically, however, it causes them to remain infected for
twice as long as non-vaccinated people - six weeks, as opposed to three.
This extra three weeks actually causes the number of bacteria in the
lungs to be more than 100 times higher in vaccinated people, Merkel said, making them far more effective at spreading the disease than non-vaccinated individuals.
"The
observation that [acellular pertussis], which induces an immune
response mismatched to that induced by natural infection, fails to
prevent colonization or transmission provides a plausible explanation
for the resurgence of pertussis and suggests that optimal control of
pertussis will require the development of improved vaccines," wrote Merkel and others in a 2014 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Ominously,
it's not just that the vaccine has gotten weaker. Widespread
vaccination has actually spurred the evolution of more lethal forms of
pertussis that produce higher concentrations of pertussis toxin,
according to articles in Emerging Infectious Diseases and the Journal of the American Society for Microbiology.
An article in the Journal of Infectious Disease
suggested that this more potent bacteria might have been responsible
for a 2008-2010 pertussis outbreak in Australia. It is unclear if this
more potent pertussis is more likely to produce symptoms in vaccinated
people than earlier forms of the disease were.
Vaccines... or hand washing?
Merkel
says that people showing cold-like symptoms during a pertussis outbreak
should go to a doctor immediately before they develop a cough.
Pertussis is bacterial, which means it can be treated with antibiotics.
"If given early enough, it will prevent the severity of the symptoms and it will prevent transmission," Merkel said.
Hand washing also stems the spread of the disease, he said.
Sources for this article include:
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