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[Beat this: The Ministry of Health has announced that vaccines and vaccination processes were not to blame for the death of 11 Vietnamese children since last April. ....The deaths were accidental, said Hien, and were caused by unforeseen individual reactions to the vaccinations.]
http://www.thanhniennews.com/healthy/?catid=8&newsid=36948
March 22, 2008 12:24:51 Vietnam (GMT+07)
Vaccines not responsible for 11 child deaths: ministry
The Ministry of Health has announced that vaccines and vaccination processes
were not to blame for the death of 11 Vietnamese children since last April.
The statement was made Thursday in Hanoi at a conference on vaccination safety
held by the National Institute of Hygiene and Epidemiology (NIHE) and the World
Health Organization (WHO).
Addressing the meeting, head of the NIHE Nguyen Tran Hien said investigations
led by the ministry, the WHO and local police had turned up no evidence of
misconduct concerning vaccine preservation or inoculation procedures.
Vaccine composition and quality were also ruled out as reasons for the
children's deaths as was previously suspected.
The deaths were accidental, said Hien, and were caused by unforeseen individual
reactions to the vaccinations.
The main reactions causing death were shock, vaccine sensitivity, acute coronary
and respiratory failure, he said.
Jean-Marc Olive, chief representative of the WHO in Vietnam, said every vaccine
had a certain rate of adverse reactions and that no vaccine can ever be 100
percent safe.
The rate of adverse reactions to vaccines in Vietnam is 1.4 per one million
shots and still within the internationally acceptable rate of one-two incidences
per one million shots.
Since 2006, 46 cases of post-vaccination reactions have been documented among
31.9 million injections of 12 kinds of vaccines in Vietnam.
Hepatitis B vaccine, Polio vaccine and Diphtheria-Pertussis-Tetanus vaccine are
the most injected.
They also, therefore, cause the most reactions, said Hien.
Source: SGGP