http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/09/health/09vaccine.html?_r=1&hpFear of a Swine Flu Epidemic in 1976 Offers Some Lessons, and Concerns, Today
By ANDREW POLLACK
Published: May 8, 2009
With fears of swine flu engulfing the nation in 1976, Janet Kinney got vaccinated to make sure she would be able to take care of her children. Instead, her children ended up taking care of her.
About a week after getting the swine flu shot, she recalled, “I was so weak I couldn’t push down the toaster button.” She spent a month in the hospital, paralyzed from the neck down, before gradually recovering.
With health authorities now gearing up for what could be a huge vaccination campaign against a new strain of swine flu, the experience of 1976 is raising a note of caution.
The feared swine flu epidemic of 1976 never materialized. And several hundred people, including Ms. Kinney, who is now 68 and lives in Gig Harbor, Wash., developed Guillain-Barré syndrome, a rare neurological condition that causes temporary muscle weakness or paralysis. More than 30 of those people died.
Many experts say they do not think a vaccine for the new flu strain, called H1N1, would raise a similar risk for Guillain-Barré. But answering that question is difficult because to this day, no one has figured out why the 1976 vaccine caused the disease, in which the body’s immune system mistakenly attacks the nerves.
Indeed, some researchers still question whether the vaccine did cause Guillain-Barré, particularly since flu vaccines in other years have been linked to little or no risk of the disease.
“It doesn’t make sense that one flu strain would cause Guillain-Barré syndrome where none of the others have,” said Dr. Paul A. Offit, a vaccine expert at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
Still, many experts consider the matter settled. The Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences concluded after an extensive review in 2003 that the “evidence favored acceptance of a causal relationship” between the 1976 vaccine and the syndrome. It stopped short, however, of saying the evidence “established” a causal relationship.
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