Irish Times
In conversation with Eoin Burke Kennedy
07/06/2010

IT ALL started with what appeared to be an adverse reaction to a vaccination jab back in 1991. I was working in Dublin’s Beaumont Hospital, and as my job routinely brought me in contact with blood, it was necessary to get inoculated against hepatitis B.

I suppose you could say the vaccine, which was administered in three stages, highlighted an underlying illness. By the time I’d had the third injection, it was obvious something was wrong; my skin had turned completely yellow. I remember being startled at the colour of my eyeballs in the mirror.

I went to my doctor who carried out a series of blood tests, which pointed to a problem with my liver. I was referred to a specialist in Beaumont and taken in for another series of tests, which confirmed I had a condition known as primary biliary cirrhosis, an auto-immune disease which affects the liver.

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Khetam Malkawi
Zawya.com
05/09/2010

Hepatitis B and C are the leading causes for cirrhosis of the liver in Jordan and the Middle East, health experts said on Saturday.

Doctors affiliated with Jordan’s Friends of Liver Patients Society said alcohol consumption is not the main cause of cirrhosis in the Middle East as in Europe, but hepatitis is, among other diseases.

During a press conference yesterday, Waseem Hamoudi, an internist gastroenterologist and hepatologist, said that although there have been no recent studies on the prevalence of hepatitis in the Kingdom, studies conducted in the 1980s indicated that some 3 to 12 per cent of the population was infected with the disease.

Since 1994, Jordan has witnessed the largest reduction in hepatitis B prevalence in the entire region due to the availability of the hepatitis B vaccine, according to Tareq Qutob, hepatologist and society member.

He noted that the only way to avoid contracting hepatitis C is through personal hygiene, as there is no vaccine for the disease currently.

According to Maisam Akroush, a hepatologist at Prince Hamzah Hospital, the monthly treatment cost for hepatitis B patients is around JD400, while the total cost of hepatitis C treatment ranges from JD400 to JD1,000.

Saturday’s press conference was held as part of the society’s campaign to mark World Hepatitis Day, observed annually on May 19.

As part of its campaign, the society will organise a walk to raise funds to support the treatment of underprivileged hepatitis patients in the Kingdom, organisers said.

Hepatitis C is a contagious liver disease that results from infection with the hepatitis C virus. It is usually spread when blood from a person infected with the hepatitis C virus enters the body of someone who is not infected, according to the US Centres for Disease Control website.

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Jesse Mckinley
NYTimes
05/02/2010

SAN FRANCISCO — It is an image both shocking and strangely serene: 10 beauty queens, each with a broad smile, sparkling earrings and a beautiful gown. And written across the bottom of the photograph is a simple, stark question.

“Which one,” it reads, “deserves to die?”

The image is part of a provocative advertising campaign by San Francisco Hep B Free, which aims to eradicate the disease with citywide vaccinations against hepatitis B. The campaign debuts here in print and on television this week and is aimed at jarring the city’s large Asian population into confronting the stubborn public health hazard of hepatitis B.

San Francisco health officials estimate that as many as 1 in 10 residents of Asian descent are infected with the virus here, a percentage that contributes to the nation’s highest rate of liver cancer, an unhappy distinction for a city that prides itself on its innovative universal health plan as well as its response to past epidemics like AIDS. In the general population, about 1 in 1,000 people are infected with hepatitis B, which attacks the liver.

A large part of the problem, according to leaders in the Chinese-American community, which is the largest Asian ethnicity here, is the stigma attached to the disease, which is endemic in much of Asia. The advertisements encourage people to get a “simple blood test” because “hepatitis B can be treated, even prevented.”

“We are not a confrontational group,” said Fiona Ma, a state assemblywoman from San Francisco, who is Chinese-American. “No one wants to talk about it. But we know that people care about their families and their friends. And maybe if they know it can affect them, then maybe they’ll talk about it.”

Ms. Ma knows of what she speaks; several years ago, she learned she had hepatitis B, which she apparently contracted from her mother. The virus that causes the disease can be spread through blood or other bodily fluids, said Dr. Edward A. Chow, vice president of the San Francisco Health Commission, who said that the disease often displays few symptoms in its carriers.

“It doesn’t manifest itself until it’s really too late,” said Dr. Chow, who said about 25 percent of patients, if untreated, develop serious ailments like liver failure.

The campaign’s confrontational approach has ruffled some feathers. Vicky M. Wong, the president and chief executive of DAE, the San Francisco firm that developed the ads, said that several of the beauty queen models walked out of the photo sessions because they were worried about its approach.

“There were so many debates as to whether ‘Are we going too far, is this right or not?’ ” said Ms. Wong, whose company specializes in campaigns geared to Asian audiences. “We got a lot of pushback. But there’s a lot of people who loved it.”

Ted Fang, a committee member for Hep B Free, said the high rate of infection among Asians here has been especially frustrating considering that a vaccine for the disease has existed for nearly 30 years.

“We have the medical tools, so long as doctors will test their patients and monitor them,” Mr. Fang said. “We can knock out this disease.”

Mr. Fang and others liken the city’s efforts to the battle against AIDS, which ravaged San Francisco and its gay community in the 1980s and 1990s and also inspired in-your-face tactics. The Hep B Free program began several years ago with a more gentle campaign — the tagline was “B A Hero” — but organizers said it had gone only so far.

“Saying ‘Life is beautiful; get tested,’ doesn’t work,” Ms. Wong said.

For the “Which one deserves to die?” campaign Ms. Wong enlisted volunteers from the Asian community to pose for photographs, depicting families, a basketball team, a group of doctors and office workers.

While the campaign is being published in several languages — including Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese — a target group is English-speaking doctors, outside the Asian community, who might not be aware of the prevalence of the disease.

“Within our ethnic groups, we are all aware of this, because we all have friends and families who have it,” Dr. Chow said. “But if you are a very busy practitioner who has a lot of different types of patients, you may not know to check at first.”

For Ms. Ma, the assemblywoman, who said she discovered she was positive for hepatitis B when she tried to donate blood, her goal was to bring the disease “above ground,” she said. And it is personal: while she is in good health, her mother, who is in her 70s, had part of her liver removed as a result of the disease.

She recovered, Ms. Ma said, but others she knew have not.

“It’s a silent killer,” she said.

Zhang Jiawei
ChinaDaily.com.cn
04/23/2010

A total of 44 pupils became sick and was taken to the hospital after receiving the hepatitis B vaccine at school on Thursday in Huilai county, in Jieyang of Guangdong province, the Guangzhou Daily reported Friday.

On Thursday morning, 84 pupils got the injection, and some felt ill half an hour later, and 44 had been taken to the hospital as of 5:00 pm, the newspaper said.

The disease control center of Huilai county said they have used more than 90,000 doses of the same batch of hepatitis B vaccine but did not have any abnormal reactions. The rest of the vaccine has been sealed up.

“The vaccine was transported here by the special refrigerated truck of Jieyang’s disease control center,” said Wu Junqiu, head of the disease control center of Huilai county. He said it was impossible that there were any problems in the storage and transportation process of the vaccine, he said.

The newspaper said the vaccine was produced by a Shenzhen-based biological product company and was valid until Sept 1, 2012. And the syringes, which are valid until October 2012, were produced by a Shanghai-based company.

As of 5:00 pm Thursday, 39 of the pupils didn’t have any obvious symptoms and five suffered from throat congestion, Wu said, adding that experts had checked them one by one.

The cause of the reactions is still being investigated.

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Christina England
American Chronicle
1/11/2010

Yesterday a story broke in Great Britain where hundreds of front line workers had had routine vaccines as a condition of employment and had become vaccine damaged as a result. These workers, which included doctors, nurses, firefighters, prison officers, forensic scientists and binmen received vaccinations as a condition of employment and have since become ill. Once ill and leaving them effectively unable to perform the job the had trained for and loved they have been abandoned by the ever so caring British Government.

Lucy Johnston -Fury at Vaccine Scandal from the Express took up their story.

“Up to 200 doctors, nurses, firefighters, prison officers, police officers, forensic scientists and binmen say they have developed serious physical and mental health problems after injections essential for their work over the past 10 years. All have given up their jobs and some are up to 60 per cent disabled.”

The British Government should hang their heads in shame. Although these workers were not forced to have these vaccinations they did face losing their jobs if they didn’t receive them. These men and women put their lives in danger to keep Great Britain safe, they make life and death decisions and face some of the most dangerous situations known to man. This is how their Government treats them.

Lucy writes;-

“Frontline health workers, social workers. prison officers and binmen have to be vaccinated against Hepatitis B as a condition of their employment.

This is to protect them from contracting potentially fatal conditions from infected blood through needle injuries and physical assaults.

Although they are not legally forced to have the vaccinations, without them they are not allowed to work.”

This sounds like they are forced to me.

The conditions that these workers now have as a result of the vaccinations are reported to be , chronic fatigue, muscle pain and cognitive problems. These are problems that many experts say are associated with adverse reactions to vaccines.

Dr Charles Shepherd in his letter to the BMJ – Hepatitis B vaccination and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome says:-

“I wish to report some preliminary findings on a cohort of 91 CFS patients where the outset or a significant degree of relapse appears to have been associated with vaccination. Of particular interest is the fact that 50% (54/91) of these cases involve vaccination against hepatitis B”

His letter makes interesting reading especially the part that that states;-

“Of concern is the fact that (a) several health workers reported that they were persuaded to continue with their vaccination course despite the fact that they did not appear to be fully recovered from an adverse reaction (eg general malaise) following the first or second dose, (b) very few of these adverse reactions have been reported to the Committee on Safety of Medicines and (c) the manufacturers acknowledge that individual adverse reactions can include fatigue, myalgia, arthralgia, headache, insomnia and lymphadenopathy but refuse to accept that any causal link has been established with a combination of the above (ie CFS).”

He is not alone in his findings.

Dr Byron Hyde – testimony before the Quebec College of Physicians Medical Board

Hepatitis B vaccination and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

“We looked at hep B immunisation in Quebec province because one nurse phoned us saying she had CFS after having hep B immunization…..About a month later the same nurse called again, she now had 5 other nurses in the area who had fallen ill with CFS-like symptoms after the vaccine, all were unable to return to work. I told her to phone the maker, Merck. She told me she did and they said the 6 nurses were the only persons in the whole world that had ever had a serious side effect and therefore there couldn’t possibly be a link. And, they told her that she was the only person who had ever phoned….she said that when her doctor phoned, he too was told he was the only person in the world that had ever called, and when each of the doctors of the other nurses called in, each was told the same thing”

One nurse explains how the Hep B vaccine she was required to have stole two years of her life in her response to an article in the BMJ.

Hep B vaccine stole two years of my life

Dawn C Etchell,

occupational health adviser

imperial Buildings Rotherham,

S60 1PA

“I was working as a dialysis nurse and attended for my first ever Hepatitis B vaccine without any worries. The following day I felt unusually tired. The tiredness gradually became totally out of charcter for me and gathered momentum over the following week. I even fell asleep during a routine filling at the dentist. Finally, I had a seizure one morning in the shower and had to call out my General Practitioner. I was unable to get out of bed for the next two weeks and slept for around 18 hours of every day for the next four weeks. If I tried to ‘come round’ my legs would give way and the feeling of pressure in my spine and head were frightening. My vision was constantly blurred and hard to understand. My thyroid was painful and swollen and I had palpitations that were disabling. Electric like shocks in my arms and legs were acute and came without warning. My brain was ‘foggy’ and Ifelt was living in a dreamlike state most of the time. I had difficulty finding words and my speech was slurred. I was referred to a neurologist – brain scan normal – blood tests normal except for raised Anti-Nuclear Antibodies initially – EEG normal – TSH 0.5 – T4 15 (3 months later TSH 0.46) Diagnosis – reactive seizure. All of my symptoms were pointing to a tentative diagnosis of Myalgic Encapelopathy/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. This I rejected after some six months and am now under annual review for thyroid blood tests. My health suffered greatly and it has taken two years to return to 80% of my previous health status. I never did receive a definite diagnosis and have had to resign myself to the fact that ‘this is as good as it gets’. I, of course, never returned for the full course of hep B vaccines and decided to leave dialysis and return to Occupational health – with a totally different view of administering such ‘preventative’ vaccines! I refused the lumbar puncture as this was offered at a time when I could feel some improvement in my general health and I did not want any further decline at this point. This vaccine should come with a very strict warning and anyone who administers the Hep B vaccine should have ALL the facts at their disposal. I was totally unaware of the dangers before I had the vaccine but found hundreds of cases similar and worse than my own after the event.

Competing interests: None declared”

Around the world Governments are putting the very people they rely on in a crisis in danger, by using emotional blackmail to force them to have vaccines. The very least they can do is when these people suffer adverse reactions is to compensate them for their injuries. After all they keep saying the vaccines are safe, perhaps they are worried that compensation may prove that they are not.