[wanabidii] Fwd: [GAVI CSO] FW: The New York Times: Vaccine Rule Is Said to Hurt Health Efforts

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Amy DIETTERICH <amy.dietterich@ifrc.org>
Date: Tue, Jan 8, 2013 at 8:54 PM
Subject: [GAVI CSO] FW: The New York Times: Vaccine Rule Is Said to
Hurt Health Efforts
To: "gavi-cso-constituency@googlegroups.com"
<gavi-cso-constituency@googlegroups.com>




The New York Times

Vaccine Rule Is Said to Hurt Health Efforts

17 December 2012

By Sabrina Tavernise

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/17/health/experts-say-thimerosal-ban-would-imperil-global-health-efforts.html?ref=world&_r=0

A group of prominent doctors and public health experts warns in
articles to be published Monday in the journal Pediatrics that banning
thimerosal, a mercury compound used as a preservative in vaccines,
would devastate public health efforts in developing countries.

Representatives from governments around the world will meet in Geneva
next month in a session convened by the United Nations Environmental
Program to prepare a global treaty to reduce health hazards by banning
certain products and processes that release mercury into the
environment.

But a proposal that the ban include thimerosal, which has been used
since the 1930s to prevent bacterial and fungal contamination in
multidose vials of vaccines, has drawn strong criticism from
pediatricians.

They say that the ethyl-mercury compound is critical for vaccine use
in the developing world, where multidose vials are a mainstay.

Banning it would require switching to single-dose vials for vaccines,
which would cost far more and require new networks of cold storage
facilities and additional capacity for waste disposal, the authors of
the articles said.

"The result would be millions of people, predominantly in low- and
middle-income countries, with significantly restricted access to
lifesaving vaccines for many years," they wrote.

In the United States, thimerosal has not been used in children's
vaccines since the early 2000s after the Food and Drug Administration
and public health groups came under pressure from advocacy groups that
believed there was an association between the compound and autism in
children.

At the time, few, if any, studies had evaluated the compound's safety,
so the American Academy of Pediatrics called for its elimination in
children's vaccines, a recommendation that the authors argued was made
under the principle of "do no harm."

Since then, however, there has been a lot of research, and the
evidence is overwhelming that thimerosal is not harmful, the authors
said. Louis Z. Cooper, a former president of the academy and one of
the authors, said that if the members had known then what they know
now, they never would have recommended against using it. "Science
clearly documented that we can't find hazards from thimerosal in
vaccines," he said. "The preservative plays a critical role in
distribution of vaccine to the global community. It was a no-brainer
what our position needed to be."

Advocacy groups have lobbied to include the substance in the ban, and
some global health experts worry that because the government
representatives due to vote next month are for the most part ministers
of environment, not health, they may not appreciate the consequences
of banning thimerosal in vaccines. The Pediatrics articles are timed
to raise a warning before the meeting.

"If you don't know about this, and you're a minister of environment
who doesn't usually deal with health, it's confusing," said Heidi
Larson, senior lecturer at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical
Medicine, who runs the Vaccine Confidence Project.

In an open letter to the United Nations Environmental Program and the
World Health Organization this year, the Coalition for Mercury-Free
Drugs, a nonprofit group that supports the ban, disputed the assertion
that scientific studies had offered proof that thimerosal is safe, and
urged member states to include it in the ban.

That it is being used in developing countries, but not developed
countries, is an "injustice," the letter said.

The World Health Organization has also weighed in. In April, a group
of experts on immunization wrote in a report that they were "gravely
concerned that current global discussions may threaten access to
thimerosal-containing vaccines without scientific justification."

Dr. Larson said she believed that the efforts of pediatricians and
global health experts, including the W.H.O., would influence the
negotiations in Geneva and that the compound would most likely be left
out of the final ban.

"You can't just pull the plug on something without having a plan for
an alternative," she said.


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