HEP-B VACCINE, AN UNJUSTIFIED HEALTH HAZARD
Across Canada each year, thousands of school children are lined up and injected with hepatitis B vaccine. Parents are not adequately informed of the risks associated with the vaccine nor are they told that children in Canada have an extremely low risk of contracting the disease. Hepatitis B is not a common childhood disease. The risk according to recent statistics from Health Canada is minute, with only 25 cases reported in 1998 in children under the age of 14 in the entire country, yet thousands of children every year are exposed to the hazards of the vaccine. Parents are not told that hepatitis B vaccine is genetically engineered, that it contains thimerosal a known neurotoxin, and that no long term follow up for adverse reactions has been done. Pre-marketing clinical trials lasted only 4-5 days, not long enough to determine autoimmune reactions that can take weeks and months to emerge.
According to vaccine researcher, Dr. Bonnie Dunbar, "The pathologies that are common to hepatitis B virus infections are the same types of symptoms that are associated with both the plasma derived (old vaccine) and the new yeast derived recombinant hepatitis B vaccine. These include rheumatoid arthritis type symptoms, optic neuritis, multiples sclerosis like symptoms, demyelinating disorders and a variety of vascular disorders and chronic fatigue syndrome." Dr. Dunbar reports that "we re finding there are 3 basic categories of adverse reactions. When you look at the published reports in the literature we have a majority of neurological type of symptoms, rheumatic/rheumatology, autoimmune types of symptoms and a variety of others vascular, etc."
In a resolution voting against mandatory childhood vaccines, members of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons stated that "children under the age of 14 are three times more likely to suffer adverse effects -- including death -- following the hepatitis B vaccine than to catch the disease itself." While Canadian statistics are sparse on vaccine associated adverse events, the VAERS adverse events reporting system in the United States offers the following statistics. To be sure, a similar trend would be expected in Canada.
http://www.aapsonline.org/aaps/
Overall, VAERS has received a total of 17,497 reports of adverse reactions to the hepatitis B vaccine, reactions that occurred after people received the vaccine alone, rather than in combination with other vaccines, during the period between July 1, 1990 and October 21, 1998. Moreover, fully 5,983 of these reports chronicled such serious events as hospitalizations, while 146 of them told of deaths. VAERS, furthermore, is a passive system, not a mandatory one. This suggests that only a fraction of adverse events are actually reported, a fraction estimated by FDA officials to be as low as 1% to 10%.
http://www.biospace.com/articles/111199.cfm
Until recently the vaccine was given in a three dose schedule - the first dose usually started in the fall at the beginning of the new school term, a second injected dose about a month later, and the third dose approximately 6 months later. In July 2000, The National Advisory Committee on Immunization (NACI) announced a revised schedule under the heading "The Statement on Alternate Adolescent Schedule for Hepatitis B Vaccine", published in the Canada Communicable Diseases Report - Vol. 26 (ACS-5), July 1, 2000. This brief report announces that children age 11-15 will have available a two dose schedule to be given in the school setting, and identifies the vaccine as Merck Frosst's Recombivax HB, but omits pertinent product information and does not disclose details of how the new 2 dose hepatitis B vaccine differs from the old 3 dose vaccine. The NACI statement can be viewed online at:
http://www.phac-aspc.gc.ca/publicat/ccdr-rmtc/00vol26/26sup/acs5.html
Canada Communicable Disease Report - Volumn 26-25 - Index 2000 - Published February 20014
The timeline of the hepatitis B vaccine program varies from province to province. Some provinces start injecting children in Grade 3, others start in grade 4, 5, 6, or 7, and high schools offer catch up campaigns for students who missed their shots in elementary school.
New Brunswick, and the North West Territories routinely inject newborn infants within hours of birth with hepatitis B vaccine, while also offering it with the early infant shots starting at two months. Prince Edward Island includes it in the infant shots and also offers it in schools. British Columbia recently also has added hepatitis B vaccine to its routine infant vaccination program, starting at two months.
According to the Canadian Immunization Guide - Fifth edition (1998), " HBV infection is usually associated with exposure to blood or infectious bodily fluids. Common means of transmission include heterosexual and homosexual contact, injection drug use, and perinatal transmission (mother to infant). The risk of transfusion-related hepatitis B is extremely low because of routine HBsAg screening of donated blood and rejecting of donors at risk of infection. Infections also occur in settings of close personal contact through unrecognized contact with infective fluids." People at high risk for getting hepatitis B disease are intravenous drug users who share contaminated needles, prostitutes, prisoners, sexually promiscuous persons and babies born to infected mothers.
Canada offers prenatal blood screening (which includes testing for hepatitis B infection) to all pregnant women, and in rare cases of maternal infection, newborn infants are immediately treated with hepatitis B immune globulin (HBIG), which offers immediate short term passive immunity. Immune globulin is prepared from pooled human plasma from selected donors with high level of anti-HBs who are seronegative for blood borne infections. This screening and treatment insures that vulnerable, at risk infants are protected from acquiring hepatitis B and effectively reduces their risk of becoming lifelong carriers of the disease. The majority of adults, and older children who might rarely contract the disease usually recover, and develop lifelong immunity. Only a small percentage of people who contract hepatitis B go on to become carriers of the disease and/or develop degenerative liver disease.
Health Canada reports "an encouraging picture of declining incidence of HBV infection in Canada in recent years. The reasons for this apparent decline remain speculative. A high-risk group approach to the use of hepatitis B vaccine has been in place in Canada since 1982 (3) and prenatal screening, at first targeted at high-risk pregnant women and later at all pregnant women, has also been in place since 1982..........A downward trend for the incidence of HBV in the early 1990s has also been reported in the United States and has been partly ascribed to declining transmission among injection drug users, possibly as a result of safer needle-using"
Canada Communicable Disease Report - Volumn 23-7 - Published April 1997
http://www.phac-aspc.gc.ca/publicat/ccdr-rmtc/97pdf/cdr2307e.pdf |
