SUNDAY , 29 OCTOBER 2006
http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/print/0,1478,3843513a11,00.html
By GREG MEYLAN
Public health doctors are worried vaccination rates will fall as a result of speculation about the safety of the meningococcal B vaccine.

Immunisation Advisory Centre director Dr Nikki Turner said negative publicity over the past week had seen an increase in calls from parents concerned about vaccinating their children against the 11 different diseases currently covered by inoculations.

Last week, the Sunday Star-Times revealed the Norwegian Institute of Public Health is conducting a study of 160 people who claim they contracted chronic fatigue syndrome after taking part in the vaccine trial in the late 1980s.

On Wednesday, National Party health spokesman Tony Ryall said ACC had paid compensation for an adverse reaction in 33 of the 1.1 million people who received the meningococcal B vaccine.

Turner said the average ACC payout was less than $80, not much more than a single doctor's visit, and she was confident the Norwegian study would find no link between the vaccine and chronic fatigue.

She said a Canadian study into a similar claim about a hepatitis B vaccine showed there was no connection, and the meningococcal disease had never been linked to chronic fatigue syndrome.

Turner said parents had already started questioning whether to give their children other vaccines, but she hoped the downturn would be short-lived, as occurred after a mistaken link between the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine and autism was reported in the UK.

"There is always a dilemma between the media interests and public health interests," Turner said.

As a result of the increased publicity, the Health Ministry had calls from about half a dozen people last week claiming to have suffered an adverse reaction to the vaccine.

Meningococcal B vaccine campaign director Dr Jane O'Hallahan said the claims were being dealt with, and each case was being forwarded to the Centre for Adverse Reactions Monitoring for evaluation.

Immunisation Advisory Centre communication director Helen Petousis-Harris said it was significant that the background rate for chronic fatigue syndrome was between 0.18% to 0.5%, but the self reported rate after publicity in Norway was more than 10 times lower at only 0.012%.

Petousis-Harris said it was natural that people associated an illness that started at the time of a vaccination with the vaccine, but whether or not this was the case was more complicated to establish.

For example, she said, there were 65 cot deaths a year in New Zealand, more than one a week. "Just by chance a number of these deaths will occur in the same week after immunisation, but research shows that the risk of cot death is slightly lower after immunisation, indicating a protective effect."