The other night I caught the tail end of a TV ad for a new vaccine: the adult pertussis vaccine. The part of the ad that I saw implied that children were getting pertussis from adults. You could be infecting and endangering your children! They could be getting whooping cough from you! Now wouldn't you feel bad if that happened? You should go get vaccinated for this horrible disease!
I wonder why in veterinary medicine the intranasal Bordetella (kennel cough) vaccine is generally agreed to be more effective than the injectable version, but people are still vaccinated against Bordetella (whooping cough) by injection. The studies of incidence of pertussis in adult populations show a wide variety of results, anywhere from <1% to 8%. Several of the studies diagnosed people with whooping cough based on antibody titers....because they were unsuccessful at culturing the actual bacteria from these people.
I don't know much about humans, but I can tell you how effective the vaccine is in dogs....Not! I have seen some lousy side effects from this simple, supposedly harmless vaccine, and about half of the dogs get kennel cough from the vaccine itself.
It seems that we'd be better off shoring up our immune systems, rather than falling for another profit-driven fear campaign. The vaccine manufacturer must have a lot of extra product around that they need to dump. And well they know, nothing sells like emotion. Now go out there and quit making kids sick!
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