Health officials refute vaccine allegations
- Source: Global Times
- [01:38 March 18 2010]
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By Deng Jingyin
Heath authorities in Shanxi Province denied that unsafe vaccines were responsible for killing or seriously disabling about 100 children, in response to a report published in the China Economic Times.
Shanxi Provincial Health Department asserted Wednesday that they haven't received any report about abnormal reactions to the vaccines.
"The authorities sampled the stored vaccines in 2008 and the test results showed all samples were in line with national standards," Li Gui, an official from the department, told the Xinhua News Agency Wednesday.
The department sent health workers to look into the cases mentioned in the news report, he added.
The Ministry of Health sent a team in November 2008 to investigate after some websites ran reports in 2007 about the vaccines in the province, but found no problems, according to the China News Service.
The team found that the province's medical institutions filed 11 cases of abnormal reactions to vaccines between January 2006 and November 2008, which involved children. Six of them were mild, four of them were not related to vaccines. Only one was deemed abnormal, but the vaccine did not belong to the batch mentioned in the report.
It also said that the ministry required the Shanxin health authority to submit a new report on abnormal reactions.
The latest government actions followed the China Economic Time's report, which said four children died and about 74 children were disabled or left with sequela. Most of them received vaccines before they were diagnosed with a medical problem.
Wang Mingliang's only son,Xiao'er, who was born in 2007, developed convulsions and a fever a week after receiving a hepatitis B vaccine for the second time in the hospital. And one week later, Xiao'er was sent to the hospital due to breathing difficulties, the newspaper reported.
Despite treatments in the hospitals in Liulin, Taiyuan and Beijing, Xiao'er died in March 2008, four months after he was born.
Doctors at the hospital failed to reach an unanimous explanation about the reason for his death.
"I have excluded almost all possible causes, except the vaccine," the father told the newspaper.
It was not an isolated case. Liu Ziyang, 8 months old, died of so-called "henoch-Schonlein purpura." Two boys from Yangquan, 3 years old, both died after getting vaccinated for rabies in 2008 and 2009 respectively, the paper reported.
Zhai Rufang, an official from the Shangxi Provincial Disease Control and Prevention Center, said in a report in the Shangxi Evening News in 2008 that one out of 2 or 3 million people have an abnormal reaction to vaccines.
But Chen Tao'an, former chief of the information department of the center, said that since 2006, many vaccines had been found with problems resulting, among other reasons, exposure to warm temperatures, the China Economic Times reported.
"These vaccines have been used for a long period of time in Shanxi, which will definitely increase the probability of an abnormal reaction," he said.
