5.4 million swine flu jabs saved six lives: report
Published: 15 Feb 12 08:47 CET | Print version
Online: http://www.thelocal.se/39118/20120215/
A total of six lives were saved by Sweden's massive swine flu vaccination programme, according to a new report, despite 60 percent of the Swedish population getting vaccinated.
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A tally carried out by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) after the pandemic had passed found Sweden ended up with a death rate of 0.31 fatalities per 100,000 people.
In Germany, where only eight percent of the population was vaccinated, the fatality figures were the same.
And in Poland, which didn't have any vaccination programme at all, the death rate was only 0.47 per 100,000 , the Svenska Dagbladet (SvD) newspaper reports.
“We concluded that six fatalities were avoided by the mass vaccination programme,” Lisa Brouwers of the Swedish Institute for Communicable Disease Control (Smittskyddsinstitutet) told the newspaper.
In addition, Sweden has documented 168 cases of vaccine-related side effects, compared to only 29 in Germany.
“I feel stupid. What disappoints me most is that it was important that everyone in Sweden was vaccinated. The problem is that you don't get any sort of help afterwards,” 27-year-old Ida Andersson told the Aftonbladet newswpaper.
Andersson suffers from the sarcoidosis in her lungs, inflammation of the face, and abnormal drowsiness attributed to having been vaccinated against the swine flu.
“I don't know if I'll be sick for the rest of my life or if I'll ever get better,” she said.
So far, no explanation of the results of vaccination programmes in different countries has been carried out yet.
“The ECDC is still investigating and doesn't have any answers yet,” Johan Giesecke, head researcher at the Swedish agency, told SvD.
Sweden's own National Board of Health and Welfare (Socialstyrelsen) is also carrying out a review of the swine flu vaccination programme which has yet to be completed.
Lars-Olof Kalling, former head of the Swedish Institute for Communicable Disease Control, thinks one explanation to the differences between countries may be that the flu was so mild that the vaccinations didn't make much of a difference.
What do you think? Leave your comment below.
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It is a bit ambiguous.... (or tendentious?)
Can you see now why the authorities take it seriously?
Could you imagine the screaming coming from the citizens of the countries that didn't vaccinate if the mortality rate had been much higher? Break out the pitchfork and torches and march on Warsaw.
Let's cue all the conspiracy theorists that this is all a scam concocted by government to line the pockets of their friends in big Pharma.
The bigger unanswered question is why the Scandinavian countries were affected so greatly by Narcolepsy while the U.S. had no statistically significant increase in the disease.
Sweden has an obligation to run mass vaccinations on anything flagged as a pandemic. I'm pretty sure lots of higher ups are rather angry at swine flu being flagged as a pandemic as well, because it took away a lot of money that could have been spent on better things. In many countries.
From what I understand it, they - was it WHO? - failed to flag bird flu as a pandemic fast enough - a flu that actually is dangerous. So when swine flu was discovered, the panicked and flagged it too fast.
Without appointing blame I think its important that those affected are given help (money) to lead as normal a life as possible. They can't drive cars, get jobs etc etc. Its not charity, but common sense because if we need to mass vaccinate again I think a lot of people will hold off as no safety net exists. The sums of money are tiny compared, try buying one less jas fighter plane for example.
Lives were saved..I would not want to have been one of the 6
The 1918/1919 influenza epidemic will never happen again. It was likely caused by World War I, which brought into close quarters millions of people who had rarely strayed more than a couple of miles from home in their lives. You are then far more likely to pick up a strain of something you have never been exposed to and transmit it rapidly. Humanity, through its close interaction with peoples and cultures throughout the world, is now largely inoculated against worldwide pandemics of any sort.
None of our most recent "pandemics" caused more than a couple hundred fatalities, and these were largely confined to poor, unsanitary ares of the world. Officials have their hearts in the right place with these inoculation programmes, but the shots have no more effect than to give jobs to those who prepare the shots. An unfortunate side effect is, of course, that when you inject a disease into somebody (which is what all inoculations involve), the person is far more likely to contract the disease or suffer side effects from the body's immune response to fighting the foreign invader.
plus how do we know the Poles didn't have another similar virus in greater numbers than say Sweden in the past, so a greater percentage of the population had more natural resistance to the new virus. The data isn't just about pure live or die stats where viruses are concerned.
The 1918/19 influenza pandemic originated in asia, and killed as aggressively there as it did everywhere else. World war One was not fought in Asia. Its mortality rate was roughly the same everywhere; war or no war. It respected neither class nor geography. It seems every person in the world caught it; some hardly noticed, some felt very ill, some died. It mostly took young men who drowned in the fluid that filled their lungs.
Influenza experts agree, it will eventually return, there is currently no cure, and we should take it very very seriously. You can suit yourself.
The 1918 flu epidemic was probably the greatest disaster of the farmacology: that a big number of the deaths may have been caused not by the virus, but by a drug used to treat it: aspirin.
The Journal of the American Medical Association suggested a dose of 1,000 o 4,000 milligrams every three hours, the equivalent of almost 25 o 100 standard 325-milligram aspirin tablets in 24 hours
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/health/13aspirin.html?_r=0