All children should be vaccinated against chickenpox after new research showed the disease caused the deaths of six youngsters in one year, doctors have urged.
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| Parents are already worried about the number of jabs administered to children
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More than 100 children were admitted to hospital with life-threatening complications caused by the virus, the study found. Scientists at Bristol University said chickenpox was extremely dangerous and should not be seen as an illness children get as a rite of passage.
The Government's vaccine advisers are considering introducing a jab to protect children against the disease, which affects around 200,000 a year.
Prof Andrew Hall, the chairman of the joint committee of vaccination and immunisation, said it would look at the new research published in the British Medical Journal.
However, doctors are concerned that - despite the obvious benefits of a chickenpox programme - parents may not accept another childhood vaccination especially if combined with the MMR jab, as has been suggested, because of lingering fears over safety.
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A growing number of parents are already worried about the number of vaccinations - 17 jabs against 12 diseases before the age of 18.
Research carried out at Bristol University and published online today, investigated cases of chickenpox where children had been admitted to hospital between 2002 and 2003. The average age of children with complications was three.
Comment: In a follow on article in the Daily Telegraph we read this:-
Chickenpox vaccine 'will overload children'
By Rebecca Smith, Medical Editor
Last Updated: 2:26am GMT 08/11/2007
The prospect of another vaccine for children has been criticised by campaigners who say the Government would be ''irresponsible" to add a chickenpox jab to an already congested programme of immunisation.
If it was to be added it would take the total number of diseases children are protected against from 12 to 13.
They are given in 17 different injections by the age of 18, including the new jab for the human papilloma virus vaccine - a cause of cervical cancer - which is to be introduced next year.
Campaigners say there are already too many jabs in the childhood programme and children's immune systems are being overloaded.
The concerns come after research into the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine linked it to autism and bowel conditions. As a result thousands of worried parents decided not to vaccinate their children.
Dr Andrew Wakefield's study was later withdrawn from The Lancet and widely discredited.
He is facing an inquiry by the General Medical Council over the way the research was conducted.
Jackie Fletcher, from the campaign group Jabs, said: "We have to make sure the vaccine is safer than the disease. We need to investigate adverse events.
"There are thousands of families reporting damage to us after the MMR vaccine and some of them have received a Government payment which is a Government acknowledgement that the child's condition or death has been caused by the MMR vaccine.
"For them (the Government) to consider introducing another live vaccine into the MMR is irresponsible.
"If we have to have a vaccine against chickenpox it should be a single vaccine and offered as an option."
Campaigners said data from America suggested 79 deaths had followed vaccination with a four-in-one vaccine containing chickenpox, measles, mumps and rubella and more than 32,000 ''adverse events" had been reported.
It is not known whether these deaths and side effects were caused by the vaccine - they were simply recorded as having occurred at some point afterwards.
In the 10 years the vaccine has been used in America more than 10 million doses have been administered.
Dr David Elliman, a consultant in community child health at Great Ormond Street Hospital, said it was impossible to overload a child's immune system with vaccines and said there is no evidence to support that theory.
He said if the immune system was damaged by vaccines children would catch more infections after having jabs, but they do not.
He also said vaccination did not increase the risk of developing auto-immune diseases like asthma, diabetes, or arthritis, as some have claimed, and that studies have shown vaccinated children are not more likely to develop these conditions.
Dr Elliman added that although children are given more injections now than 20 years ago, the vaccines in total contained fewer proteins and so are less of a challenge for the immune system to deal with.
He said that because parental confidence was still returning after the MMR scare it would be best to wait a little longer before introducing chicken pox to the jab.
Dr. Elliman adds that children get more vaccinations today/now than twenty(20) years ago.. Is there a correlation between these vaccinations and the rise in child autism? I hear on the radio that 1 in 160 children may have symptoms of autism. Is everything going along with the pathocrats game plan? Hmmm... I just wonder...