2.13  DTaP – a Safer Vaccine

Despite all the initial denials in 1996 the DPT vaccine was replaced with a safer version, the  acellular DPT or the DTaP vaccine in the United States. The less expensive ($9 less per dose) DPT vaccine was used throughout the 1990s despite the fact that it had been available in Japan since 1981 and resulted in a reported  83 per cent. decline there in minor reactions and has appeared to have eliminated seizure, brain damage and death (Rock, 1996).

Compared with whole cell pertussis vaccine, acellular pertussis vaccine is significantly less likely to produce reactions such as fever, fuzziness, pain, drowsiness, anorexia and swelling  (Zimmerman, Kimmel and Trauth, 1996).
According to the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS), adverse events associated with the older DTP vaccine  are 30 per cent. greater overall than the DTaP vaccine.

Adverse reactions to routine vaccines are obstacles to the mass vaccination campaigns as research by Relyveld, Bizzini and Gupta (1998) indicated.  There have been ways to minimise these reactions but these procedures failed to gain wide acceptance because current partially purified vaccines meet the regulatory requirements and manufacturers are reluctant to change procedures “due to the amount of work involved in the regulatory issues.”  The work involved includes toxin purification, using better tolerated antigens and checking immunity status of potential vaccines to avoid negative reactions.  Relyveld et al  (1998) stated that this type of risk taking with individual health is astonishing and unethical. According to Bright and Barnet (2000), the DOH was forced to recall Medeva’s oral polio vaccine after it was discovered that the firm had been using potentially BSE-infected material, and had failed to clean, maintain and sanitise equipment at appropriate intervals and ensure batches of vaccines conformed with all established standards.

This vaccine was withdrawn in August 2004 and replaced with a combined "five in one "vaccine which includes polio. Guess what? The new vaccine is claimed to be safer , I am sure it is because there is no mercury in it.  As parents were not told of any risks from DTaP we have no way of quantifying the reduced risk of the "five in one". By May 2006 adverse events associated with the new "safe" vaccine were being reported I have requested  information on the more serious adverse reactions to DTaP from the Department of Health under the Freedom of Information Act and will post it when I get an answer. It should be kept in mind that in April 2001 A Food and Drug Administration advisory panel rejected GlaxoSmithKline's bid to gain a recommendation for approval of its five-in-one childhood vaccineBy a vote of 6-5 (and 1 abstention), the FDA's Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee said that the data supplied by the company were not adequate to support the efficacy of Infanrix (DTaP)-Hep B-IPV when given to infants in a primary series at 2, 4, and 6 months of age. Committee members also expressed concern about increased. fevers associated with the combination that contains diphtheria, tetanus, acellular pertussis, hepatitis B, and inactivated polio vaccines. There were a couple of significant reactogenic differences: Unusual crying and/or restlessness occurred more often in the control group. Fevers of greater than 38 degrees Celsius, or 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit, were significantly more common among the recipients of the combination vaccine: 43.3% of 4,668 infants who received the combination plus Hib vaccine, compared with 26.4% of the 768 infants who were given the different vaccines separately.