Um, isn't smallpox gone?

[Skeptic Ginger]

in other news, the black death is back



yikes - lock up your fleas!

Wow, it was 5, now it's up to 8 antibiotics. Those pesky yersinias exchanging all those biological fluids.

No more squirrel hunting.

 

[autumn1971]

My wife has plenty of anecdotes about the unbelievable ignorance of the doctors she works with. To be fair, it seems that anyone actively studying a field is not expecting to be more conversant with the ideas of that field than those who hae gone before, but it seems that all too often the elders have literally forgotten more than the neophytes know.

 

[kellyb]

I'm confused about this post. I sure as he11 wouldn't go out and try to get a varicella infection were I not immune. And what do you mean not attenuated at all? Think you might want to update your varicella vaccine knowledge with more accurate information.

Do you have any cases of fatal disseminated shingles in a person who has a normal immune system? Know of any fatalities related to varicella vaccine? Know of any cases of fatalities from varcella vaccine shingles?

Because I can find you the fatal cases from wild varicella infection.

I promised myself I wasn't going to engage in this subject here anymore, because I joined this forum because I'm a skeptic...not because I want to argue a pet controversy.

But I'm just too argumentative. I apparently can't help myself.

Do a current literature search on attenuated Oka and dorsal root ganglia, and you'll find exactly what I've found. The varicella vaccines contain a spectrum of attenuated viruses. When people develop breakthrough varicella after vaccination, the virus isolated is different from the majority of the vaccine viruses. The vaccine contains unattenuated varicella virons. This, in and of itself, isn't a big deal. What's a bigger deal though is that even the attenuated virons are still quite good at infecting the dorsal root ganglia. And they reactivate just like wild varicella.

Since shingles isn't reportable, no one really knows if this is a problem or not. And even when it's found that shingles is increasing, it's hard to weed out the effects of decreasing varicella circulation from an increase in corticosteroid exposure. And it doesn't help matters that the CDC fired their varicella epidemiologist when he began reporting bad things. On the bright side, his findings were published all throughout Europe, and the European health authorities are watching the American experiment closely.

And yes, kids have died from chickenpox after being vaccinated for chickenpox. Some of the breakthrough cases are lethal. But that's a bit of a non-issue since wild chickenpox is undeniably more lethal. But at least 76 kids have been killed by the varicella vaccine viruses.

 

[Capsid]

And yes, kids have died from chickenpox after being vaccinated for chickenpox. Some of the breakthrough cases are lethal. But that's a bit of a non-issue since wild chickenpox is undeniably more lethal. But at least 76 kids have been killed by the varicella vaccine viruses.

That's quite alarming. Can you provide the links, please?

 

[kellyb]

That's quite alarming. Can you provide the links, please?

Any time there's a death it's sad, but 76 over the course of 10 years isn't really all that bad. All of these kids are probably the same kids who would have been killed by wild varicella, probably, too. But even more would have died from wild varicella. This is 76 deaths as opposed to over a thousand that would have died before the vaccine

http://www.medalerts.org/vaersdb/fi...BY=&V_FUNDBY=&PAGENO=1&action=Find&PERPAGE=10

I know some goofy stuff makes it into the database sometimes, and I haven't looked through every page, so maybe some of them were coincidences, but here's an example:

Days since Vaccination: 14
Symptoms: DEHYDRAT EMPHYSEMA HEM GI HYPOTENS IMMUNE SYSTEM DIS NECRO SKIN PNEUMONIA PNEUMOTHORAX

That really sounds like breakthrough varicella after vaccination in a kid with a pretty badly compromised immune system.

Here's more on why and how breakthrough varicella happens after vaccination sometimes:

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=535228&tools=bot

Varicella virus vaccine strain Oka (V-Oka) has in rare cases caused zoster in vaccinated people. Despite broad usage of V-Oka, little is known about varicella-zoster virus genomic sequence variation of strains in vaccine and isolates from patients with vaccine adverse events.

We demonstrated here that an in vivo-selected virus, V-Oka-zoster, isolated from a vaccinated zoster patient has wild-type ORF 10 and that it emerged from a vaccine preparation containing both vaccine and wild-type gene 10 variants (Table 2). The isolated vaccine variant also displayed the wild-type SNPs for 9A (a structural protein), 21 (capsid assembly protein), 52 (DNA helicase/primase complex, associated protein), and 55 (probable helicase, required for viral replication), any of which might also contribute to differences in pathogenicity.

These findings confirm that both GlaxoSmithKline and Biken varicella vaccines are mixtures of several variants of attenuated VZV, some of which are likely to vary with respect to degree of attenuation. Detailed evaluation of every identified vaccine-specific SNP and their relative proportion in vaccine preparations is outside the range of this report and will require careful investigation. Importantly, V-Oka-zoster represents a single vaccine-related VZV strain, a variant that contained six wild-type (P-Oka) bases at identified vaccine SNPs and otherwise carried only vaccine-associated SNPs. None of these six polymorphisms reliably distinguish VZV Oka vaccine from wild-type VZV, since they represent SNPs that are variably expressed in the V-Oka-GSK mixture.

That's about the European vaccine, but I've never heard that either Merck or GSK did anything special to the V-Oka strain after it was given to them. I suppose if they did, it would be trade secreted, but the vaccine was fairly successful in Japan, so I can't imagine them wanting to mess with perfection.


Another...
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/cg....1086/423210&erFrom=-4287797616546263147Guest

Vaccination against chickenpox causes a varicella-like rash in up to 5% of healthy children and 50% of children with leukemia. The vaccine may establish latency and reactivate to cause herpes zoster, albeit more rarely than wild-type virus. All vaccine preparations are composed of a mixture of varicella-zoster virus strains that show genotypic variation at several loci. We have shown, by DNA sequencing of 40 polymorphic loci, that viruses sampled from vesicles in varicella-like and herpes zoster rashes are single clones. This finding suggests that, between the time of inoculation of the vaccine and development of rash, selection of single strains occurs. The results have general implications for the pathogenesis of varicella-zoster virus.

It is nice to see medical science talking in real scientific terms like "selection", though, isn't it?
I would imagine that it would be almost impossible to be a virologist and not believe in natural selection, though.

One more, the most recent:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/...ve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=17182747

Natural selection for rash-forming genotypes of the varicella-zoster vaccine virus detected within immunized human hosts.

The inoculation of >40 million patients has consequently created a highly replicated evolutionary experiment that we have used to assess the competitive ability of these different viral genotypes in a human host.

 

[fls]

Any time there's a death it's sad, but 76 over the course of 10 years isn't really all that bad. All of these kids are probably the same kids who would have been killed by wild varicella, probably, too. But even more would have died from wild varicella. This is 76 deaths as opposed to over a thousand that would have died before the vaccine

http://www.medalerts.org/vaersdb/fi...BY=&V_FUNDBY=&PAGENO=1&action=Find&PERPAGE=10

I know some goofy stuff makes it into the database sometimes, and I haven't looked through every page, so maybe some of them were coincidences, but here's an example:

That really sounds like breakthrough varicella after vaccination in a kid with a pretty badly compromised immune system.

I looked the examples on the first page in detail (and skimmed the other pages). They are not examples of deaths from varicella vaccination, but rather deaths in people who had also received varicella vaccine at some point (days to years) prior to their death. There was only one case (on the first page) where it looked like the patient may have become ill and died due to varicella after a varicella vaccination. The example you quoted listed Epstein-Barr Virus as a cause of the illness. Other examples include a woman who had acute leukemia that was discovered after she developed a few vessicles after receiving the vaccine, but her death was due to her chemotherapy and complications, a woman that died of sarcoma (and had received the vaccine 102 days earlier - no mention of any varicella related disease or complications), several babies with SIDS, other viruses (Respiratory synticial virus, echovirus), etc.

Linda

 

[kellyb]

I looked the examples on the first page in detail (and skimmed the other pages). They are not examples of deaths from varicella vaccination, but rather deaths in people who had also received varicella vaccine at some point (days to years) prior to their death. There was only one case (on the first page) where it looked like the patient may have become ill and died due to varicella after a varicella vaccination. The example you quoted listed Epstein-Barr Virus as a cause of the illness. Other examples include a woman who had acute leukemia that was discovered after she developed a few vessicles after receiving the vaccine, but her death was due to her chemotherapy and complications, a woman that died of sarcoma (and had received the vaccine 102 days earlier - no mention of any varicella related disease or complications), several babies with SIDS, other viruses (Respiratory synticial virus, echovirus), etc.

Linda

I just looked through them more closely, and you're right that some of them couldn't have had anything to do with varicella. But in the case of the one with EBV, varicella rash, and necrotic skin all at the same time, it's sort of hard to say that "X factor" was the reason for the death, isn't it? It seem like if any of the factors hadn't been there at that moment in time, the outcome would have probably been different?

 

[HeyLeroy]

This is from an article later fleshed out into a book:

The Demon In The Freezer(Excerpt)
THE smallpox virus first became entangled with the human species somewhere between three thousand and twelve thousand years ago -- possibly in Egypt at the time of the Pharaohs. Somewhere on earth at roughly that time, the virus jumped out of an unknown animal into its first human victim, and began to spread. Viruses are parasites that multiply inside the cells of their hosts, and they are the smallest life forms. Smallpox developed a deep affinity for human beings. It is thought to have killed more people than any other infectious disease, including the Black Death of the Middle Ages. It was declared eradicated from the human species in 1979, after a twelve-year effort by a team of doctors and health workers from the World Health Organization. Smallpox now exists only in laboratories.

Smallpox is explosively contagious, and it travels through the air. Virus particles in the mouth become airborne when the host talks. If you inhale a single particle of smallpox, you can come down with the disease. After you've been infected, there is a typical incubation period of ten days. During that time, you feel normal. Then the illness hits with a spike of fever, a backache, and vomiting, and a bit later tiny red spots appear all over the body. The spots turn into blisters, called pustules, and the pustules enlarge, filling with pressurized opalescent pus. The eruption of pustules is sometimes called the splitting of the dermis. The skin doesn't break, but splits horizontally, tearing away from its underlayers. The pustules become hard, bloated sacs the size of peas, encasing the body with pus, and the skin resembles a cobbled stone street.

The pain of the splitting is extraordinary. People lose the ability to speak, and their eyes can squeeze shut with pustules, but they remain alert. Death comes with a breathing arrest or a heart attack or shock or an immune-system storm, though exactly how smallpox kills a person is not known. There are many mysteries about the smallpox virus. Since the seventeenth century, doctors have understood that if the pustules merge into sheets across the body the victim will usually die: the virus has split the whole skin. If the victim survives, the pustules turn into scabs and fall off, leaving scars. This is known as ordinary smallpox.

Some people develop extreme smallpox, which is loosely called black pox. Doctors separate black pox into two forms -- flat smallpox and hemorrhagic smallpox. In a case of flat smallpox, the skin remains smooth and doesn't pustulate, but it darkens until it looks charred, and it can slip off the body in sheets. In hemorrhagic smallpox, black, unclotted blood oozes or runs from the mouth and other body orifices. Black pox is close to a hundred per cent fatal. If any sign of it appears in the body, the victim will almost certainly die. In the bloody cases, the virus destroys the linings of the throat, the stomach, the intestines, the rectum, and the vagina, and these membranes disintegrate. Fatal smallpox can destroy the body's entire skin -- both the exterior skin and the interior skin that lines the passages of the body.

Smallpox virus's scientific name is variola. It means "spotted" in Latin, and it was given to the disease by a medieval bishop. The virus, as a life form, comes in two subspecies: Variola minor and Variola major. Minor is a weak mutant, and was first described in 1863 by doctors in Jamaica. People usually survive it. Classic major kills one out of three people if they haven't been vaccinated or if they've lost their immunity. The death rate with major can go higher -- how much higher no one knows. Variola major killed half of its victims in an outbreak in Canada in 1924, and presumably many of them developed black pox. Smallpox is less contagious than measles but more contagious than mumps. It tends to go around until it has infected nearly everyone.

Most people today have no immunity to smallpox. The vaccine begins to wear off in many people after ten years. Mass vaccination for smallpox came to a worldwide halt around twenty-five years ago. There is now very little smallpox vaccine on hand in the United States or anywhere else in the world. The World Health Organization once had ten million doses of the vaccine in storage in Geneva, Switzerland, but in 1990 an advisory committee recommended that most of it be destroyed, feeling that smallpox was longer a threat. Nine and a half million doses are assumed to have been cooked in an oven, leaving the W.H.O. with a total supply of half a million doses -- one dose of smallpox vaccine for every twelve thousand people on earth. A recent survey by the W.H.O. revealed that there is only one factory in the world that has recently made even a small quantity of the vaccine, and there may be no factory capable of making sizable amounts. The vaccine was discovered in the age of Thomas Jefferson, and making a lot of it would seem simple, but so far the United States government has been unable to get any made at all. Variola virus is now classified as a Biosafety Level 4 hot agent -- the most dangerous kind of virus -- because it is lethal, airborne, and highly contagious, and is now exotic to the human species, and there is not enough vaccine to stop an outbreak. Experts feel that the appearance of a single case of smallpox anywhere on earth would be a global medical emergency.

At the present time, smallpox lives officially in only two repositories on the planet. One repository is in the United States, in a freezer at the headquarters of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in Atlanta -- the C.D.C. The other official smallpox repository is in a freezer at a Russian virology institute called Vector, also known as the State Research Institute of Virology and Biotechnology, which is situated outside the city of Novosibirsk, in Siberia. Vector is a huge, financially troubled former virus-weapons-development facility -- a kind of decayed Los Alamos of viruses -- which is trying to convert to peaceful enterprises.

There is a growing suspicion among experts that the smallpox virus may also live unofficially in clandestine biowarfare laboratories in a number of countries around the world, including labs on military bases in Russia that are closed to outside observers. The Central Intelligence Agency has become deeply alarmed about smallpox. Since 1995, a number of leading American biologists and public-health doctors have been given classified national-security briefings on smallpox. They have been shown classified evidence that as recently as 1992 Russia had the apparent capability of launching strategic-weapons-grade smallpox in special biological warheads on giant SS-18 intercontinental missiles that were targeted on the major cities of the United States. In the summer of last year, North Korea fired a ballistic missile over Japan in a test, and the missile fell into the sea. Some knowledgeable observers thought that the missile could have been designed to carry a biologic warhead. If it had carried smallpox and landed in Japan, it could have devastated Japan's population: Japan has almost no smallpox vaccine on hand and its government seems to have no ability to deal with a biological attack. The United States government keeps a list of nations and groups that it suspects either have clandestine stocks of smallpox or seem to be trying to buy or steal the virus. The list is classified, but it is said to include Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Cuba, and Serbia. The list may also include the terrorist organization of Osama bin Laden and, possibly, the Aum Shinrikyo sect of Japan -- a quasi-religious group that had Ph.D. biologists as members and a belief that an apocalyptic war will bring them worldwide power. Aum members released nerve gas in the Tokyo subway in 1995, and, as the year 2000 approaches, the group is still active in Japan and in Russia. In any case, the idea that smallpox lives in only two freezers was never anything more than a comfortable fiction. No one knows exactly who has smallpox today, or where they keep the virus, or what they intend to do with it.

Strange; I've read it before but I just checked this book out of the library two days ago before seeing this thread.

http://www.amazon.com/Demon-Freezer-True-Story/dp/0375508562

 

[fls]

I just looked through them more closely, and you're right that some of them couldn't have had anything to do with varicella. But in the case of the one with EBV, varicella rash, and necrotic skin all at the same time, it's sort of hard to say that "X factor" was the reason for the death, isn't it? It seem like if any of the factors hadn't been there at that moment in time, the outcome would have probably been different?

The case you quoted did not have a "varicella rash". That it was diagnosed as Gianotti Crosti syndrome tells you that the rash was not the type seen with varicella.

Also, it isn't that the presence of all these things led to death, but rather that the underlying illness is severe enough to affect multiple systems.

Linda

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

I promised myself I wasn't going to engage in this subject here anymore, because I joined this forum because I'm a skeptic...not because I want to argue a pet controversy.

But I'm just too argumentative. I apparently can't help myself.

Do a current literature search on attenuated Oka and dorsal root ganglia, and you'll find exactly what I've found. The varicella vaccines contain a spectrum of attenuated viruses. When people develop breakthrough varicella after vaccination, the virus isolated is different from the majority of the vaccine viruses. The vaccine contains unattenuated varicella virons. This, in and of itself, isn't a big deal. What's a bigger deal though is that even the attenuated virons are still quite good at infecting the dorsal root ganglia. And they reactivate just like wild varicella.

I'm not disagreeing with this much.

Since shingles isn't reportable, no one really knows if this is a problem or not. And even when it's found that shingles is increasing, it's hard to weed out the effects of decreasing varicella circulation from an increase in corticosteroid exposure. And it doesn't help matters that the CDC fired their varicella epidemiologist when he began reporting bad things. On the bright side, his findings were published all throughout Europe, and the European health authorities are watching the American experiment closely.

This is simply wrong by a bit of common sense. If shingles were killing people, it would be reportable. And not being reportable doesn't mean there are no epidemiology studies.

Disseminated shingles is serious and can be fatal with immunocompromised individuals. Shingles involving the cornea (very rare) can cause blindness in one eye. The cornea can be replaced with a transplant. And post-herpetic neuralgia is a very painful months long condition. Shingles in all these forms is treatable with anti-viral drugs.

But, there is no evidence shingles post varicella vaccine is any more dangerous than shingles post wild varicella infection. So what is your point or issue with attenuated vaccine which prevents fatalities from wild varicella?

And yes, kids have died from chickenpox after being vaccinated for chickenpox. Some of the breakthrough cases are lethal. But that's a bit of a non-issue since wild chickenpox is undeniably more lethal. But at least 76 kids have been killed by the varicella vaccine viruses.

Kelly, that's quite a claim to make without a citation.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

I just looked through them more closely, and you're right that some of them couldn't have had anything to do with varicella. But in the case of the one with EBV, varicella rash, and necrotic skin all at the same time, it's sort of hard to say that "X factor" was the reason for the death, isn't it? It seem like if any of the factors hadn't been there at that moment in time, the outcome would have probably been different?

VAERS is raw data. For Pete's sake, if you got hit by a car on the way home from the clinic it might be in there.

People die and they die after vaccinations. To go around making absurd claims like the vaccine killed 76 people is reckless. It is the disease that kills people and the vaccine is safer than the disease.