Ounce of Prevention, Pound of Misery?

0 Comments | Insight on the News, March 22, 1999 | by Aimee Howd

One of them was Eric Jeffries, a former Fulbright scholar at Cambridge and a young father on his way to the top in the banking industry. He tells Insight that he was vaccinated prior to a tropical vacation but four days later began experiencing severe autoimmune dysfunctions ranging from fever, headaches and extreme pain to rashes and gastrointestinal troubles. He immediately thought of the vaccine, but a phone call to his doctor assured him the vaccine is not associated with adverse reactions. As his condition deteriorated, he was tested for everything from rheumatoid arthritis to fibromyalgia and AIDS. Finally, a doctor seconded his suspicion that, whatever the disorder, it had been triggered by the vaccine. Today, no longer able to work or even to walk, Jeffries still is looking for answers.

Betty Fluck was told that she needed to have the hepatitis B vaccine when she returned to her work as a registered nurse after taking a few years off to raise her three boys. Just hours before the vaccine was administered, she was helping to run her three school-age sons' soccer games with her husband, a coach, and was working on her yellow belt in karate. On Dec. 2, 1997, she received the vaccine. Twelve hours later she suffered severe pain, a high fever, swollen joints and respiratory problems. Until her fever broke, Fluck lost the use of her legs. "At the time," she says, "the damage was already done or started. I didn't know at that point what the whole disease process was."

As did so many other victims, Fluck went from doctor to doctor until one finally told her that the symptoms might indicate a reaction to the hepatitis B vaccine. But vaccine manufacturers repeatedly told her that they never had seen problems like this. As months passed, Fluck needed a walker, and by September 1998 she required full leg braces and elbow crutches to get around. Now she receives weekly intravenous gammaglobulin treatments for severe demyelination (a progressive condition in which the sheath surrounding and protecting human nerves deteriorates).

Since Fluck's brief appearance on the 20/20 episode, she says, "Every day I hear people with stories that are just like mine and doctors telling them it can't be the vaccine. Essentially, we're write-offs. Just the casualties of war [on disease]."

This month Fluck testified before an Indiana state Senate hearing considering whether to set a July 1999 mandate for all children to receive the vaccine before they enter kindergarten. As a result of the hearings, the committee tabled the bill and voted unanimously to recommend that the vaccine be administered only at the parents' request.

For now, the federal health bureaucracy devotes its resources primarily to expanding and enforcing its mass vaccination policies rather than to evaluating adverse reports. Samuel Katz of the Vaccine Initiative of the Infectious Disease Society of America called Insight from the Atlanta airport enroute from the February 1999 ACIP conference where his colleague, Chen, of the CDC's National Immunization Program, presented an update on hepatitis B recommendations. Katz said the committee "reaffirmed the value of the vaccine" and of "moving ahead with the program to vaccinate children, teenagers and adults at risk."