http://www.urmc.rochester.edu/pr/news/story.cfm?id=827
The Journal of the American Medical Association announced today that a study to be published in the June 22/29 issue found that a new vaccine against whooping cough is effective in teens and adults... Until recently, teens and adults have been unable to be vaccinated with available pediatric whooping cough vaccines due to safety concerns.
http://www.kt70.com/~jamesjpn/HealthTopics/immunization.htm
A UCLA/FDA study suggested that some 11,000 to 12,000 cases of permanent neurological damage take place annually in the U.S.A. alone, as a result of DPT vaccination.
An even more shocking figure on the reaction to the DPT vaccine indicates that 1 in 100 children react with convulsions or collapse or high-pitched screaming. One out of 3 of these--that is, 1 in 300--will remain permanently damaged! According to the testimonies of the Assistant Secretary of Health, Edward Brandt, Jr. M.D., before the U.S. Senate Committee on May 3, 1985, every year 35,000 children suffer neurological reactions because of this vaccine. 2 (Compare this figure with that of federal studies in the late 1970s which concluded that some 50 children a year are permanently brain damaged by the pertussis vaccine.)
http://www.relfe.com/vaccine.html
The FDA estimates that only about 10% of adverse reactions are reported, [2] a figure supported by two National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) investigations. [3]
...In 1934, more than 265,000 cases were reported in the United States with nearly 8,000 deaths, mostly in children. In 2003, the number of deaths was 13.
http://www.relfe.com/vaccine.html
With pertussis, the number of vaccine-related deaths dwarfs the number of disease deaths, which have been about 10 annually for recent years according to the CDC, and only 8 in 1993, the last peak-incidence year (pertussis runs in 3-4 year cycles, though vaccination certainly doesn't). Simply put, the vaccine is 100 times more deadly than the disease.
Vaccination programs in children have reduced the threat, but the infection rate is now climbing rapidly among teens and adults. While the whooping cough, or pertussis, is less severe with age and often mistaken for bronchitis, ... Due to large-scale misdiagnosis, some experts believe that between one and two million U.S. adults and adolescents may now become infected annually. [Or, maybe pertussis is misdiagnosed as bronchitis?- bfg]
... “Widespread use of the new acellular vaccines has the potential to counter a quadrupling of the pertussis infection rate in teens and adults in the last three years.” [In other words, our current vaccines don't work very long if at all..... - bfg]
...The original children’s pertussis vaccine, however, caused severe injection site reactions in adults. [Maybe they reacted with high-pitched screaming? - bfg] ...
Reacting to a Japanese outbreak in the 1980s, pharmaceutical companies there (e.g. Takeda) designed pertussis vaccines that were based not on entire cell bodies, but instead on a few key proteins on the surface of the bacteria (acellular or component vaccines) ...
Over the last 20 years, Pichichero has been one of few voices arguing nationally that acellular vaccines were needed in the United States after seeing severe reactions to whole cell body pertussis vaccine in his own children. ....
Results of the study indicated that the Tdap vaccine elicited robust immune responses in adolescents and adults to pertussis, tetanus and diphtheria antigens. Specific findings include:
The killed Bordetella pertussis has a strong adjuvant effect on the diptheria and tetanus toxoids in the DPT vaccines. However, there are a number of admitted and well-describe reactions to it, such as convulsion, infantile spasms, epilepsy, sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), Reye syndrome, Guilain-Barre syndrome, transverse myelitis and cerebral ataxia. Needless to say, the causal link to it is often (even though not always) vehemently disputed and generally considered "coincidental".
Paradoxically, in one case of shaken baby syndrome in which the baby developed subdural and retinal haemorrhages from the disease whooping cough, doctors accused the father of causing these injuries and strenuously denied that the disease pertussis can and does cause such haemorrhages—forgetting that this is the very reason why pertussis vaccine was developed against such potentially devastating disease in the first place. Such devastating effects are caused by the pertussis toxin, the causative agent of the disease (pertussis is a toxin-mediated disease), employed as the active ingredient in all pertussis vaccines whether whole-cell or acellular (Pittman, 1984).
Gupta et al. (1993) concluded that PT is too toxic to be administered to humans, but chemically detoxified or genetically inactivated PT may not exhibit the adjuvant effects comparable to the native PT.