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Doubts Rise about Need for Smallpox Vaccinations.
Byline: Peter Gorner
Dec. 13--In the months to come, Americans will decide whether to get themselves and their children vaccinated against smallpox, the demonically contagious variola virus that killed as many as 500 million people before being eradicated 30 years ago.
President Bush said this week that his vaccination program, to be formally announced Friday, will make the vaccine available to all U.S. residents who want it, perhaps by 2004.
Should you get the shot? Your children?
History will offer little guidance.
Experts estimate that of every 1 million people who got the vaccine in the past, 1 or 2 died and another 52 suffered life-threatening reactions--but those same experts have little confidence in that old statistic's accuracy and have no idea if it would apply now.
The current population is so different, with millions of people with immune-depressed diseases like HIV, with organ transplants and autoimmune disorders like eczema and asthma, that some fear the rate of complications could be much higher than in the past.
And someone who got the vaccine as a child and did not have an adverse reaction has no guarantee that he or she wouldn't have one now.
What is known is that there have been no reported cases of smallpox in a generation and the threat of the disease is…
- Doubts Rise about Need for Smallpox Vaccinations.
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...of Medicine that argues against smallpox vaccinations for the general public. It probably...little residual immunity from the smallpox vaccinations that ended in the early 1970s...recommendation a step farther and make smallpox vaccinations mandatory. Terrorists already...
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- Newspaper article from: Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News February 27, 2003 700+ words
...decades, Bay Area health departments have begun offering smallpox vaccinations. But unless you're a health care worker, you won...officials never anticipated they would have to see. Public smallpox vaccinations were halted in United States in 1972, and the disease...
- LOWCOUNTRY SMALLPOX VACCINATIONS BEGIN.
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- News wire article from: Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service Manier, Jeremy Gorner, Peter March 27, 2003 700+ words
...Health officials in Illinois and New York suspended all smallpox vaccinations Thursday while investigators review the deaths of two...each other." Cases of heart inflammation following smallpox vaccinations were reported in Europe in the 1960s and 1970s, the...
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- Newspaper article from: Chicago Tribune (Chicago, IL) March 27, 2003 700+ words
...Health officials in Illinois and New York suspended all smallpox vaccinations Thursday while investigators review the deaths of two...each other." Cases of heart inflammation following smallpox vaccinations were reported in Europe in the 1960s and 1970s, the...
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