Polio Eradication Stalls with More Wild-Type and Vaccine Strain Polio Outbreaks
After 65 years of global polio mass vaccination campaigns, on Oct. 24, 2019 (“World Polio Day”) the World Health Organization (WHO) announced that, along with wild type 2 poliovirus declared eradicated in 2015, wild type 3 poliovirus has been eradicated from the earth.1 The credit for the achievement was given to the Global Polio Eradication […]
Infant Girl in India Dies Day After Receiving Oral Polio and Pentavalent Vaccines
Two-month-old Priyanka Biswal died on Sept. 5, 2019, a day after receiving the live attenuated oral polio vaccine (OPV), pentavalent (diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, hepatitis B and Haemophilus influenzae type B) vaccine and vitamin supplements at a Community Health Center (CHC) in Naranapur, India.1 2 A report by the Orissa Post noted, “after intake of the polio […]
“Vaccine-Derived” Polio on the Rise
The Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) last week reported that there have been a total of 22 confirmed cases of vaccine-derived polio paralysis, thus far, in 2019. The latest two cases involve a person from Sichuan province in China and a person in Angola. Other evidence of circulating vaccine strain poliovirus type 2 (cVDPV2) has […]
Asymptomatic Carriers of Diphtheria Identified in Canadian School
Story Highlights A case of diphtheria has been confirmed in an elementary school in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Three other people, who are asymptomatic carriers of the bacterial disease have been identified and are being treated in isolation. The diphtheria vaccine is only available as a combination vaccine (DT, Td, DTaP, Tdap) and its effectiveness wanes over […]
Infant Boy in India Falls Unconscious and Dies After Vaccination
A one-month-old boy died in Telangana, India on May 11, 2019 shortly after being vaccinated at a rural child care center in the town of Kamareddy. The child’s parents said that the baby became unconscious after receiving the vaccine and they subsequently took him to a private nursing home where physicians there declared him dead […]
America’s ‘Good Medicine’ Mindset
The idea that you can give someone a disease, or something worse than that disease, by giving them a medicine designed to cure that disease or prevent the patient from contracting it and spreading it to others is so counter-intuitive, so unethical, so downright insane that it is unthinkable, unconscionable, unbelievable. After all, isn’t the first principle of medicine to “first, do no harm”? And yet… I think one of the greatest songs of all time is the one by…