Sir, - In the extensive media coverage of the accidental administration of the three in one vaccine to 66 school children in Newbridge, repeated mention is made of the risk of significant brain damage associated with whooping cough vaccine use. This appeared on the front page of The Irish Times (November 9th) and again in an accompanying editorial.
As a paediatrician, I am continuously reassuring worried parents as to the safety of the current vaccination schedule. So am I asking them deliberately to expose their infants to a potentially brain damaging vaccine, by advocating the whooping cough vaccine? Vaccination prevents an infection by deliberately exposing, and thereby sensitising, an infant's immune system, which is then primed to react and neutralise an infecting organism before it can establish a disease. Obviously you cannot inject foreign material into anybody without the occurrence of allergic reactions, very occasionally severe, but mostly mild with local tenderness, soreness or a low grade temperature.
However, the real issue here is whether whooping cough vaccine causes brain damage, as seemingly stated by The Irish Times. If true, then there would be more cases of brain damage among children who have received whooping cough vaccine than amongst a comparable group of children not receiving the vaccine. This is an extremely simple test, as millions of children worldwide have received both vaccines over the past 30 years. To my knowledge, no case control study has ever shown this to be the case.
Anyone, or any institution, stating that an accepted and important component of our paediatric public health policy can cause brain damage must produce the evidence on which this assertion is based. No self respecting scientist would dream of making such an important, and worrying, claim based on a single case report, even one processed by our Supreme Court. The Irish Times has a clear duty to publish the date showing an increased frequency of brain damage among recipients of the whooping cough vaccine, which I await with interest. - Yours, etc.,
UCD Dept. of Paediatrics,
Temple Street Children's
Hospital,
Dublin 1.