Flu vaccine only 23% effective in U.S., even less effective in Canada

CBC News: January 15, 2015

The flu vaccine seems effective in reducing the risk of flu by 23 per cent, based on an early estimate from the U.S. among people going to the doctor for respiratory illness.

Canadian and U.S. health officials have said the most common type of flu circulating this season is H3N2, which is not well-matched with the seasonal flu vaccine.

On Thursday, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released an estimate based on 2,321 American children and adults who got the flu vaccine between November and January. The CDC said vaccinated people had a 23 per cent lower chance of winding up at the doctor with the flu.

The poor effectiveness likely reflects the fact that more than two-thirds of circulating flu viruses are genetically different or “drifted” from seasonal flu vaccines, the CDC said in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

The effectiveness was highest among children aged six months to 17 at 26 per cent. Effectiveness fell to about 12 per cent among people aged 18 to 49 and 14 per cent for those aged 50 and older.

In Canada, the flu vaccine could be working even more poorly, with “little or no protection.”

“About 98 per cent of the viruses are mismatched that have been characterized in Canada, whereas in the U.S. its closer to about 68 per cent, or about two-thirds are mismatched. So it’s not a good omen,” said Dr. Danuta Skowronski of the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control.

(read the full article at CBC)

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CBC News : January 16, 2015

People who receive flu vaccines year after year can sometimes show reduced protection, an effect that Canadian infectious disease specialists say muddies public health messages for annual flu vaccine campaigns.

During the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, researchers at the B.C. Centre for Disease Control originally thought seasonal flu shots from 2008 might offer extra protection against the new pandemic strain. They were puzzled to find instead, seasonal flu vaccination almost doubled the risk of infection with pandemic flu.

Dr. Danuta Skowronski and her colleagues went on to do five more studies during the summer that showed the same effect in people and in ferrets, which are considered the best animal model of flu.

“This was a unique finding in a unique context of dramatically mismatched vaccine to novel pandemic influenza virus,” she said.

She recalled the intense time, struggling to find answers about whether to offer the seasonal as well as pandemic vaccine in the fall. “That was the worst summer I think of my life, work wise.”

What was originally called “the Canadian problem” has since been found in a randomized control trial by researchers in Hong Kong, with more supporting evidence from Japan and the U.S.

The paradoxical finding of increased risk of H1N1 infection only occurred during the pandemic.

Blunted protection to seasonal flu

In the 10 years since the B.C. lab invented more sensitive ways to conduct this type of sophisticated immune research, there’s never been an increase in flu illness among those vaccinated compared with the unvaccinated.

But researchers in several countries have found a blunting or “interference” effect between previous seasonal vaccines and reduced levels of vaccine protection in later years for some strains.

Regardless of previous vaccination history, flu shots did protect against flu infections requiring medical care, Huong McLean of the Marshfield Clinic Research Foundation and her colleagues concluded in a September online issue of the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases. Protection was greatest among those who weren’t vaccinated previously.

“People do not have a good explanation for why,” said Dr. Michael Gardam, director of infection prevention and control at Toronto’s University Health Network.

“The idea basically is that your immune system is occupied elsewhere. It would be like getting the swirling ball of death on your Mac where your operating system is doing something else rather than opening the file.”

The end result of both puzzles is the same: more sickness.

Huong said it all points to the need to think about prior vaccination history when estimating vaccine effectiveness.

“These findings are so new, so emerging that policy-makers have not yet had a chance to fully digest them or understand the implications,” Skowronski said.

Both Gardam and Skowronski believe the emerging findings should spur the search for a better solution.

“We have kind of hyped this vaccine so much for so long we are starting to believe our own hype. Really, what we should be doing is looking for better vaccines,” Gardam said.

(read the full article at CBC)

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Unprecedented: ‘Cataclysmic’ die-off of birds on entire West Coast

Statesman Journal, Jan 2, 2015 (emphasis added): Why is the beach covered in dead birds?…  “I’ve never seen that many before”… a mass die-off [is] going on along the entire West Coast… “To be this lengthy and geographically widespread, I think is kind of unprecedented,” [said Phillip Johnson of the Oregon Shores Conservation Coalition].

Oregonian, Jan 6, 2015: Dave Nuzum, a wildlife biologist… said his office continues to field calls from concerned beach-goers who come across a grisly scene: Common murres and Cassin’s auklets dead on the beach in great numbers… Oregon is the cataclysm’s epicenter… He doesn’t expect the crush of deaths to let up any time soon… [It’s] up to 100 times greater than normal annual death rates.

Prof. Julia Parrish, Univ. of Washington School of Aquatic & Fishery Science, Jan 6, 2015: This is the worst wreck of cassins auklets that we’ve ever seen on the West Coast… Certainly we are concerned… Is it that there’s less of their food, or perhaps that food has changed its distribution?… How many cassins may actually be suffering in this particular mortality event? We’re working with oceanographers and atmospheric scientists to try and discover whether there’s something in the environment which is signaling a difference, signaling a change. >> Full broadcast

Prof. Parrish #2, Jan 6, 2015: We’re seeing some adults wash up… The bumper crop [born this year] can’t quite explain [this]… We’re easily seeing tens of thousands, if not actually more… Normally [they] can exist out in the N. Pacific [far] from the coastline over the winter. We think that the population for some reason has snugged up to the coast… Unfortunately the cassins are the canary in the coalmine for us, so they’re telling us something is going on. To put it mildly, we’re still scrambling to figure out what’s going on with the ecosystem… Of course, everybody always wants to point the finger at climate change. The thing about climate change is it’s a very slow, steady change. >> Full broadcast

CBC, Jan 7, 2014: More than 100,000 carcasses… have been found… up to 100 times the normal number are washing ashore… “It’s a tragic event… We have never seen a die-off of Cassin’s like this, so that in and of itself says something” [said Parrish].

CBC News excerpts, Jan. 6, 2015:

• CBC: It is a West Coast mystery — a mass die-off.
• Prof. Parrish: [It’s] certainly indicating to us that there is something wrong.
• CBC: Necropsies show no disease, no viruses, no bacteria.
• Parrish: Tens of thousands of birds dead on the beach is something that we just can’t ignore — we ignore that at our peril.
• Full broadcast here

  (originally compiled at : ENENEWS)

  The real fallout from Fukushima

  Colby Cosh
  Macleans: January 8, 2015

  On the verge of the new year, scientists from the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans issued the first systematic report of measurements on the spread of radioactive seawater from Japan’s damaged Fukushima nuclear reactor to the coast of British Columbia. The bad news, if you want to call it that, is that Japanese-originated radioactivity has in fact reached detectable levels on Canada’s continental shelf. The menace from the Land of the Rising Sun is officially here—and is, for now, growing.

  The good news is that, as responsible scientists almost universally predicted, the amount of radioactivity involved is infinitesimal and completely harmless. You can go ahead and eat the fish.

  (read the full article here Macleans)
  
  Unexplained bird die-off almost 4 years into an unprecedented nuclear disaster, but we are expected to believe the radiation is “completely harmless”. A big problem with this suggestion that radiation is harmless, is the fact that the dose will continue to increase significantly because the Fukushima disaster is still ongoing.

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AlternativeFreePress.com

Once again an outbreak of an apparently vaccine-preventable disease is infecting exclusively vaccinated people. 15 out of 15 students infected with whooping cough last month at Falmouth High School in Massachusetts had been vaccinated.

To report this information, CBS News decided to publish a ridiculous article focusing on the growing number of people choosing to not vaccinate their children. CBS spends 8 paragraphs detailing how “Once vaccination rates go down, the likelihood of an outbreak increases”, and then finally admits the truth: “But in this case, a school official tells WBZ that all the students had been immunized.”

Dr. Russell Blaylock, a board-certified neurosurgeon, author and lecturer who attended the LSU School of Medicine and completed his internship and neurosurgical residency at the Medical University of South Carolina explains how herd immunity is only truly obtainable through natural immunity:

“In the original description of herd immunity, the protection to the population at large occurred only if people contracted the infections naturally. The reason for this is that naturally-acquired immunity lasts for a lifetime. The vaccine proponents quickly latched onto this concept and applied it to vaccine-induced immunity. But, there was one major problem – vaccine-induced immunity lasted for only a relatively short period, from 2 to 10 years at most, and then this applies only to humoral immunity. This is why they began, silently, to suggest boosters for most vaccines, even the common childhood infections such as chickenpox, measles, mumps, and rubella.

Then they discovered an even greater problem, the boosters were lasting for only 2 years or less. This is why we are now seeing mandates that youth entering colleges have multiple vaccines, even those which they insisted gave lifelong immunity, such as the MMR. The same is being suggested for full-grown adults. Ironically, no one in the media or medical field is asking what is going on. They just accept that it must be done.”

RELATED:

Majority of flu vaccinations don’t work, admits CDC

New Jersey Mumps Outbreak Exclusively Infecting Vaccinated Population; same as in New York & Ohio

Measles Outbreak Traced to Fully Vaccinated Patient

Ohio & New York 2014 Mumps Outbreaks Only Infect Vaccinated Population

Written by Alternative Free Press

Massachusetts Whooping Cough Outbreak Only Infecting Vaccinated Students by AlternativeFreePress.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Sources:
15 Falmouth High Students Diagnosed With Whooping Cough
Forced Vaccinations, Government, and the Public Interest

The CDC Says The Current Flu Vaccine Everyone’s Taking Might Be A Bad Match For The Virus

Julie Steenhuysen
Reuters: December 3, 2014

A sampling of flu cases so far this season suggests the current flu vaccine may not be a good match for the seasonal flu strain currently circulating in the United States, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Wednesday.

The U.S. health agency issued a health advisory to doctors noting that flu virus samples the agency took from Oct. 1 through Nov. 22, showed that just under half were a good match for the current influenza A flu strain contained in the current H3N2lu shots for 2014-2015, suggesting the virus has drifted.

In past seasons when the influenza A strain has mutated, the vaccine has been less effective, the CDC said in the advisory.

(read the full article at Business Insider)

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Historic innovations that have been adopted too hastily with grave unforeseen impacts provide cautionary examples for potential side effects of fracking, says report by government’s chief scientist Mark Walport

Fracking risk compared to thalidomide and asbestos in Walport report

Fracking carries potential risks on a par with those from thalidomide, tobacco and asbestos, warns a report produced by the government’s chief scientific adviser.

The flagship annual report by the UK’s chief scientist, Mark Walport, argues that history holds many examples of innovations that were adopted hastily and later had serious negative environmental and health impacts.

The controversial technique, which involves pumping chemicals, sand and water at high pressure underground to fracture shale rock and release the gas within, has been strongly backed by the government with David Cameron saying the UK is “going all out for shale”.

But environmentalists fear that fracking could contaminate water supplies, bring heavy lorry traffic to rural areas, displace investment in renewable energy and accelerate global warming.

The chief scientific adviser’s report appears to echo those fears. “History presents plenty of examples of innovation trajectories that later proved to be problematic — for instance involving asbestos, benzene, thalidomide, dioxins, lead in petrol, tobacco, many pesticides, mercury, chlorine and endocrine-disrupting compounds…” it says.

“In all these and many other cases, delayed recognition of adverse effects incurred not only serious environmental or health impacts, but massive expense and reductions in competitiveness for firms and economies persisting in the wrong path.”

Thalidomide was one of the worst drug scandals in modern history, killing 80,000 babies and maiming 20,000 babies after it was taken by expectant mothers.

Fracking provides a potentially similar example today, the report warns: “… innovations reinforcing fossil fuel energy strategies — such as hydraulic fracturing — arguably offer a contemporary prospective example.”

The chapter, written by Prof Andrew Stirling of the University of Sussex, also argues that the UK and the world could tackle climate change with energy efficiency and renewable energy alone but vested interests in the fossil fuel industry stand in the way.

[…]

Greenpeace UK’s energy campaigner, Louise Hutchins, said: “This is a naked-emperor moment for the government’s dash to frack. Ministers are being warned by their own chief scientist that we don’t know anywhere near enough about the potential side effects of shale drilling to trust this industry. The report is right to raise concerns about not just the potential environmental and health impact but also the economic costs of betting huge resources on an unproven industry. Ministers should listen to this appeal to reason and subject their shale push to a sobering reality check.”

(read the full article at The Guardian)

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