Vaccination Immunity Duration
You may have seen in the media that skepchick.org has a campaign to give people boosters to their Pertussis (Whooping Cough) vaccination immunity. At the recent DragonCon free injections were being given out.
Over the past year or two I’ve been doing a lot of research into vaccines and the anti-vax movement. One thing I did not know was how long the immunity you gain from vaccination can last. With a new baby in the family who is just approaching his first vaccinations and the recent re-emergence of Pertussis (particularly in California) I have become concerned whether my immunity is up to scratch and whether I or anyone else my son might come into contact with might even be a carrier of diseases that he could catch.
I had to visit my doctor yesterday so I asked him “Why we don’t have continual boosters throughout our life for Pertussis or Tetanus for example?”
He said that the perceived wisdom here in the UK is that after your childhood course of 5 vaccinations for each condition you are as good as protected for life. Now my doctor is pretty good and quite the skeptic himself. We recently had a good chat about Andrew Wakefield being struck off. So he didn’t state this as fact. He stated it as the NHS’s position.
Since then I’ve been looking for research articles on the duration of vaccination immunity and so far this is the kind of evidence that I’ve found:
Pertussis vaccination immunity wanes in 4-12 years
Natural immunity can last up to 30 years
There are also articles which discuss the need to re-vaccinate the elderly against diseases including Pertussis.
So it seems on the surface at least that the NHS is wrong. If the last vaccination is given in the mid teens then by the age of 30, possibly even by the age of 20, people will have lost their immunity to at least some of the diseases they were vaccinated against. Those diseases may no longer pose a significant threat to their lives but they do still pose a risk to the lives of the young and old they come into contact with.
Now I am thoroughly confused about why we let this risk exist and I draw no firm conclusions at this point as to the level of the risk or the accuracy of the links above in relation to the specific NHS vaccination schedule. More research needs to be done but my opinion is clearly moving towards there being a real risk as a result of this vaccination policy.
Critical Thinking, Medicine, Science | PadainFain September 1, 2010
1 Comment to “Vaccination Immunity Duration”
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI
By Me, September 4, 2010 @ 9:53 pm
Wouldn’t worry about it too much, according to Jenkinson D. Natural course of 500 consecutive cases of whooping cough: a general practice population study. British Medical Journal 1995; 310: 299-302: ‘Most children with whooping cough now only have what appears to be a bad cold followed by a cough, making the diagnosis easy to miss. Serious complications can occur but are much less common than they used to be.’
In the California cases there is no way of knowing whether or not they were actually suffering or died of pertussis or parapertussis (which no vaccine is available for) or from something else unless lab confirmation is given in all 1500 cases so far.
There is some talk of mutation in the pertussis disease as well so vaccinating the elderly would have no impact on the amount of cases should that talk be true. And should that be true it is most likely mutations are the cause of vaccination, so go figure.