ANOTHER vaccine, another scare. This time in the UK, where the government has announced plans to introduce from September a new five-in-one jab for infants that will protect against diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, polio and a bacterial meningitis (Hib).
Opponents say that injecting five vaccines at once might overload a child鈥檚 immune system, perhaps triggering adverse reactions or leaving them vulnerable to other infections.
But the UK Department of Health counters that the new vaccine is safer because the polio component is inactivated instead of live, and the whooping-cough component no longer consists of whole cells, which can cause redness and swelling. And Canada has been using a similar vaccine safely for seven years. What鈥檚 more, children already receive the five vaccinations in one go, with four in a single shot and the polio component given by mouth on a sugar lump.
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Multiple vaccines may also be safer for another reason, says expert Paul Offit of the Children鈥檚 Hospital of Philadelphia in Pennsylvania, who calculates that babies could safely be given a single shot to protect against 10,000 diseases (Pediatrics, vol 109, p 124). He says the proposed five-in-one vaccine is less likely to stimulate an adverse reaction, as it contains just 22 to 24 antigens, compared with 70 in a single chickenpox shot, for example. And that鈥檚 nothing next to the 3200 antigens included in the five vaccines routinely given to infants in the US in the 1960s.