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by fnordfnordfnord
4670 days ago
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>Because a baby whose mother is infected with Hep-B Well, we didn't elect to deliver in the back room of a whorehouse, or under a tree on the prairie. We went to one of the best hospitals in the country, where blood tests are done in advance of delivery, where these things are discussed and planned as part of the pre-natal pregnancy care. Wife and I are both vaccinated, and apparently Hep-B negative. I have to make sure my kids aren't raped by Hep-B positive child-rapists, which is sadly too common. > There's no infectious material at all, making it a very safe vaccine. You keep missing something from my posts. I don't doubt the science behind vaccines. You don't need to convince me that vaccines are practically a modern miracle. I lack confidence in manufacturers, and in fairness of the NVIC. |
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You seem to think that Hep-B is only spread through sex and drug use, and from the mother through childbirth. This is incorrect. For example, one of the citations in the above report was to http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2626287 . It seems some 30% of Hep-B infections come from unknown sources.
> We investigated two situations involving hepatitis B virus exposure among children in day care. In the first a 4-year-old boy who attended a day care center developed acute hepatitis B; another child at the center, who had a history of aggressive behavior (biting/scratching), was subsequently found to be a hepatitis B carrier. No other source of infection among family and other contacts was identified and no other persons at the center became infected.
Before the vaccine, some 24,000 children got Hep-C each year. That's down about 90%.
As to the "very safe vaccine", nothing in that last line was meant to imply that you needed any sort of religious faith in vaccines nor that you doubted the science. It was meant to explain why failures by the manufacturer are less likely to lead to severe adverse effects than with the older vaccine. This is an engineering consideration and not a science one.
The previous vaccine was only "safe", and not "very safe." The older vaccine started with blood serum from people who had Hep-B, and purified it so only Hep-B proteins remained. This has a risk of infection should something go wrong in the purification process so that the full virus - or other viruses - somehow get through. This sort of failure would be very risky for newborns.
But the current vaccine, which is based on a genetically modified form of Baker's yeast, does not come from human sources. Since human viruses aren't in the source material, they can't enter the vaccine. There can still be other failure modes, but the most fatal - introduction of virulent particles directly into a newborn baby - can't happen through a process failure during vaccine manufacturing.
Think also of the oral polio virus. This uses an attenuated virus, that is, a mutant form of the polio virus which infects the child, but doesn't cause the symptoms. The child's immune system produces the same antibodies at it would the wild-type virus, which provides immunity. The problem is, the attenuated virus mutates in the body, and it can mutate towards a form which is deadly. This happens about once every 750,000 cases.
Again, this is not the type in the modern Hep-B vaccine - there is no infectious material at all - making it safer than oral polio virus. That's why I said Hep-B is "very safe."