Posted on 05/19/2013 2:38:48 PM PDT by neverdem
You will notice that I did not claim that you are lying about having GB. I explained as unemotionally as possible about GB; often people take my unemotional presentation as criticism, which it is not. I firmly believe that emotions should not be allowed to color information. My comment about the kooks was not aimed at you.
GB is an autoimmune disease which most often happens after certain infections. About 1 per 100,000 children under 18 develop GB per year, unrelated to vaccines. Less than 1 case per 1,000,000 vaccinated is thought to occur.
The most likely cause of this autoimmune disease (GB) is that a protein in the pathogen looks like a human nervous system protein. When your body responds to the pathogen by making antibodies, some of those antibodies then recognize these nervous system proteins as invaders. Cells containing those proteins are destroyed by the immune system. I think that how much influenza proteins resemble human nervous system proteins is dependent on the type of influenza. There are many types of influenza; new influenza viruses appear frequently.
When you receive a vaccine, you get a small dose of influenza proteins. When you get influenza, you get a large dose of those proteins. I think that a person who is unlucky enough to develop GB after a vaccination would almost certainly develop GB if they were to get sick with the same virus that is in the vaccine.
Perfectly healthy children die from influenza. They can die because influenza induces a “cytokine storm”, which is when the immune system goes into overdrive. Or they can die because influenza weakens the immune system, causing them to be susceptible to bacterial infections. Or the influenza can just kill them without those complications. People over 65 are also highly likely to die of influenza. Healthy adults below age 65 are less likely to die of influenza.
A vaccine contains a selection of proteins from the pathogen. It cannot make you sick. It teaches your body how to respond if you encounter that pathogen. There is no antigen in the vaccine that isn’t in the pathogen. However, in many cases, the pathogen can kill.
Did you go to www.clinicaltrials.gov and read a few of the clinical trials being conducted on influenza vaccines right now? You can also go to www.pubmed.org and look for published studies on vaccine trials. Vaccines are extensively tested in thousands of patients. I don’t know where you get the idea that they aren’t tested.
Vaccines are made out of dead pathogens. In the unlikely event a vaccine interacted with some drug, then the live pathogen would certainly interact with that drug. And since live pathogens can do so much damage, up to permanent damage and death, I’d rather have a small dose of dead pathogen in a vaccine.
Vaccines are probably the most important medical advance in human history. Vaccines are responsible for the fact that the life span is now close to 80 years. We eradicated the killer smallpox with vaccines, and are on track for eradicating polio within a few years. Vaccines already have made the world safer for us.
Any time!
I hate to see misinformation stand unrebutted. I’m afraid that otherwise, people may think the misinformation is valid and act on it, unaware that they are endangering their lives.
I hate to sound harsh, but if your niece got GB from a vaccine, then she almost certainly would have gotten GB by getting sick with the live virus.
GB is caused by the immune system reacting against pathogen proteins. The vaccine contains the same proteins as the live pathogen. The most common cause of GB is infection.
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