Public health officials walking a tightrope between massive demand for vaccines and intense public scrutiny of side effects now have a new standard for evaluating the safety of their vaccination programs.
Widespread concern about the 'swine flu' is prompting H1N1 vaccination programs in many countries - seldom seen on such a massive scale. Meanwhile, media and Internet chatter about side effects may provoke public anxiety and result in a lower vaccination rate.
A scholarly article "Avoiding panic in pandemics," published in The Lancet offers the first comprehensive, international baseline evidence about background illness and sudden death rates in healthy populations.
"In fact, vaccinations are one of the safest medical interventions that we have," says Noni MacDonald, a co-investigator on the study. "I am pro vaccine. Vaccines are held to a much higher standard for safety than drug treatments."
Dr. MacDonald is a professor in Dalhousie's Department of Pediatrics and a specialist in pediatric infectious diseases. In addition to working with the Canadian Center for Vaccinology, she is a past member of the World Health Organization's (WHO) Global Advisory Committee on
Vaccine Safety.
"We recognized that because the H1N1 vaccine will be given to many, many millions of people that this type of a mass campaign is a relatively unique research opportunity," says Dr. MacDonald.
When little time elapses between a vaccination and a negative health impact, there is a tendency to correlate the two as cause and effect. An alternative explanation is that the close association is in timing only and not in cause.