Friday, October 30, 2009

Medscape and Dr. John Bartlett provide US swine flu vaccine comparisons

How much mercury? Contraindications? Dosing? It's here in a simple format. And systemic reactions rates are reported to be 45%, said to be the same as for seasonal flu vaccines. (Why, if this vaccine only includes one third as much antigen, would adverse reaction rates be the same? Not sure if this is based on old seasonal flu data or new H1N1 data.) Bartlett errs slightly here, when he says there are 140 Guillain Barre cases per week in the US. The rate is 1.3/100,000/year or about 80 per week. Here researchers at Oxford note that Guillain Barre cases peak in the winter and early spring, which happens to be shortly after flu vaccine season. Coincidence? Confounding?

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