Boy diagnosed with Guillain-Barre syndrome, but CDC says no clear link

By JoNel Aleccia

Health writer

updated 3:06 p.m. CT, Wed., Nov . 11, 2009

A 14-year-old Virginia boy is weak and struggling to walk after coming down with a reported case of Guillain-Barre syndrome within hours after receiving the H1N1 vaccine for swine flu.

Jordan McFarland, a high school athlete from Alexandria, VA., left Inova Fairfax Hospital for Children Tuesday night in a wheelchair nearly a week after developing severe headaches, muscle spasms and weakness in his legs following a swine flu shot. He will likely need the assistance of a walker for four to six weeks, plus extensive physical therapy.

“The doctor said I’ll recover fully, but it’s going to take some time,” the teenager said.*

Jordan is among the first people in the nation to report developing the potentially life-threatening muscle disorder after receiving the H1N1 vaccine this fall. His alarming reaction was submitted via msnbc.com’s reader reporting tool, First Person, by his stepmother, Arlene Connin.

Increased cases of GBS were found in patients who received a 1976 swine flu vaccine, but government health officials say they’ve seen no rise in the condition associated with the current outbreak.

So far, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have received five reports of GBS in people who received the H1N1 vaccine since Oct. 6, not including Jordan’s case, said Dr. Claudia J. Vellozzi, deputy director for immunization safety.

Out of about 40 million doses of H1N1 vaccine available to date, that’s a far lower rate of GBS than the 1 case that develops in every 1 million people who receive the regular flu vaccine.

“It’s much less than we’d expect,” she said, adding that many cases go unreported.

In 1976, about 1 additional case of GBS developed in every 100,000 people who were vaccinated against the swine flu, according to the CDC.

Jordan’s parents said doctors diagnosed the teen with GBS, a rare muscle disorder that develops when a person’s own immune system attacks the nerves, causing muscle weakness, difficulty walking and sometimes paralysis and death.*

Hospital officials didn’t dispute that the boy had GBS, but refused to comment on the boy’s condition or treatment, even after his family granted permission.

“They don’t want to create a fear or panic in the community,” said Jordan’s stepmother, Connin.

Connin and Jordan’s father, Calvin McFarland, both 38, believe the shot sparked the illness that came on 18 hours after the boy’s vaccination.

No clear link

But Vellozzi said there’s no clear link between the new vaccine and the disease.

“We know that GBS and other illnesses occur routinely in the U.S.,” Vellozzi said, noting that 80 to 120 cases are diagnosed each week in the general population.

“There are events that follow vaccination. That’s what they are, they happened to follow vaccination.

GBS is among the most severe adverse events being tracked with updated systems developed by the CDC, the Food and Drug Administration and the American Association of Neurology in order to monitor the rollout of the H1N1 flu vaccine.

So far, CDC officials have received about 1,700 reports of adverse events linked to the new shot, Vellozzi said. Of those, only about 4 percent, or 68, were coded as serious. That’s on par with reports regarding seasonal vaccine.

While any harmful side effect can be devastating for an individual, when it comes to larger public health issues, the H1N1 virus is considerably riskier than the vaccine, experts say.

“The H1N1 illness is making lots of children very ill,” Vellozzi said. “There’s lots of illness and lots of death.”

So far, more than 4,000 people have died from H1N1 infection in the U.S., according to latest estimates by the CDC.

Since the start of the H1N1 vaccine campaign, the CDC has repeatedly warned that certain conditions, such as miscarriage, heart attack and even GBS occur regardless of immunization, and officials have urged the public not to blame the vaccine for the illnesses, but to report promptly any suspected side effects.

Officials at Inova Fairfax had not reported Jordan’s case to the CDC as of early today, and did not respond to queries about whether they would report the adverse event.

After hearing about Jordan’s case from msnbc.com, CDC officials advised the family to report the incident themselves.

Vaccine critic Barbara Lowe Fisher, president of the National Vaccine Information Center in Vienna, Va., said assuming all potential side effects are coincidence is a mistake. Such an attitude is likely to prevent doctors and other health workers from reporting adverse events in a timely manner, obscuring a true picture of any problems.

Fisher said only between 1 percent and 10 percent of adverse events are reported to the government’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, which was set up to track problems with vaccines. A 1986 law requires reporting of certain adverse events to VAERS, but there are no sanctions for not reporting, Fisher noted. CDC officials said general reporting to VAERS is voluntary.

Fisher said she suspects that many more cases of GBS have occurred in the wake of the H1N1 vaccines.

“We basically have people blowing it off,” she said. “We need to make sure people are reporting.”

Eager for protection

Like many parents across the country, Arlene Connin said she was eager to protect Jordan and his brother, Lleyton, 7, against the flu. When she took the boys to the local health department for seasonal flu shots on Nov. 5, the provider said H1N1 vaccine was available, too.

There was “not even a thought,” that either boy would have a reaction, Connin said. Within hours, however, Jordan developed severe headaches, chills and back spasms. The family rushed him to the closest hospital, Dewitt Army Community Hospital, where doctors conducted neurological exams, a CT scan and an EKG test.

The small hospital didn’t have the facilities to diagnose or treat Jordan’s illness, so he was transferred by ambulance on Nov. 6 to Inova Fairfax Hospital in Falls Church, VA., a spokesman said. Doctors there quickly gave Jordan intravenous immunoglobulin, a standard treatment for GBS, Connin said.

“GBS, that’s the diagnosis they gave us and that’s how they were treating him,” Connin said.

A hospital spokesman, Tony Raker, declined further comment on Jordan’s case. When an msnbc.com photographer asked to view Jordan’s chart, even with his father’s permission, hospital officials refused.

Doctors are reluctant to discuss GBS in connection with vaccines, Connin said. Anti-vaccine groups frequently cite the disorder as evidence of vaccine dangers, which public health officials fear will discourage people from getting life-saving protection, especially in the case of H1N1.

Jordan’s experience has made his parents think hard about immunization, even though they’ve always insisted on annual flu shots. Under CDC guidelines for children 9 and younger, Lleyton should receive another booster shot of H1N1 vaccine to protect him fully against the virus.

“I have mixed emotions on that one,” Calvin McFarland, the boys’ father, said. “We’re not sure what we’re going to do about that.”

© 2009 msnbc.com Reprints

• swine flu vaccines. We know they have had very limited testing and their efficacy over the short and long term has yet to be proven. We may look back at this time in our history and ask, with hindsight, did we really need to vaccinate all those children?
• Olive Leaf Extract or Garlic and other compounds have been used for hundreds of years to promote good immune health? Should we use them first?

One of the most effective means of maintaining a strong immune system is to eat foods raw and juicing is a great way to make eating fruit and vegetables easy.

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Swine Flu Could Combine With Hospital Superbugs to Kill Thousands

The combination of H1N1 swine flu and antibiotic-resistant staph bacteria could lead to a deadly form of pneumonia that kills half the people it infects within three days, according to a study published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases.

Researchers analyzed two patients who had experienced bacterial pneumonia that led to blood poisoning, concluding that the culprit was community acquired methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (CA-MRSA), the form of MRSA that occurs outside of health care settings like hospitals and nursing homes.

“The threat from CA-MRSA in the USA/UK is very serious concern, especially if there is a flu epidemic as this could trigger a large number of cases of necrotizing pneumonia, which has a mortality rate of more than 50 percent in 72 hours,” said Richard James, of the University of Nottingham.

MRSA is already a highly lethal bacteria, because its resistance to first-line antibiotics makes it more likely to cause complications such as blood or organ infections, boils or even skin necrosis. The bacteria kills more people each year in the United States than AIDS.

CA-MRSA cases are sharply on the rise, with more and more cases being reported in settings gyms, schools and prisons.

“The concern is that this may be the start of an exponential increase as we saw with hospital MRSA infections in the 1990s,” James said. “It took the UK 13 years to get to grips with hospital-acquired MRSA infections; we are not equipped to deal with large numbers of CA-MRSA infections in the community.”

CA-MRSA appears to be particularly likely to cause pneumonia when it infects people who are recovering from a flu infection.

“Bacterial pneumonia following influenza can be very serious and in some cases fatal,” said MRSA expert Mark Enright, of Imperial College London. “CA-MRSA pneumonia is particularly dangerous due to the rapid, aggressive nature of the infection and the difficulty in providing effective chemotherapy. The emergence of pandemic influenza and increased prevalence of CA-MRSA in many countries may cause increased morbidity and mortality in infected individuals.”

Sources for this story include: www.telegraph.co.uk; news.bbc.co.uk.

by David Gutierrez, staff writer Natural News

[zdvideo]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4SmFxyust0[/zdvideo]

The letter from the Health Protection Agency, the official body that oversees public health, was leaked to The Daily Mail, leading to demands to know why the information has not been given to the public before the vaccination of millions of people, including children, begins.

It tells the neurologists that they must be alert for an increase in a brain disorder called Guillain-Barre Syndrome (GBS), which could be triggered by the vaccine. GBS attacks the lining of the nerves, causing paralysis and inability to breathe, and can be fatal.

The letter refers to the use of a similar swine flu vaccine in the United States in 1976 when:

• More people died from the vaccination than from swine flu
• The vaccine may have increased the risk of contracting GBS by eight times
• The vaccine was withdrawn after just ten weeks when the link with GBS became clear
• The U.S. Government was forced to pay out millions of dollars to those affected

Concerns have already been raised that the new vaccine has not been sufficiently tested and that the effects, especially on children, are unknown.
Sources:
The Daily Mail August 15, 2009

1. The swine flu vaccination contains dangerous and life threatening fillers, including adjuvants such as squalene, animal tissues, which may include pig tissue, viral and bacterial proteins, and live viruses, all of which contain pig DNA.
2. Live viruses have a history of lethal danger, disease and are contagious. People who have been vaccinated with a live vaccine can and do spread the illness further.
3. The swine flu appears to have been laboratory generated and designed to have its dangerous effects amplifies by the use of all the available swine flu vaccines.
4. Although the UK Government hasn’t actually said as much I suspect the intent will be to commit to mass vaccinantion and although probably not mandatory at the moment  who knows what they will insist upon. The intent of the US government is to make the live virus swine flu vaccination mandatory for all Americans and Canadians.
5. The best way to protect yourself from any flu including the H1N1 live virus swine flu is to have a healthy immune system by living a natural, earth-connected way of being, which includes: Organic, plant-source only supported by supplements where necessary.

These healthy approaches have been historically proven to be far more safe and effective that generated vaccines, which have truly never been scientifically proven to be either safe or effective.

It is important that we all take a stand while we are still healthy enough to be standing.

Some important details…

This live virus vaccine has 2.3 times more genetic mutability, and added adjuvant (adjuvants simply modify the behaviour of other things) toxicity than a natural virus because it includes squalene.  Squalene is the biochemical precursor to the whole family of steroids and quite safe in a dietary form when injected directly into the blood stream is actually highly toxic.  Squalene, when injected, has significant autoimmune inflammatory effects and general severe autoimmune effects, which are a significant potential threat to the health of the individual.

Based on scientific evidence, mass mandatory vaccinations with a highly mutable live virus could actually activate a real and lethal pandemic rather than prevent it. Therefore if we look at it purely in scientific perspective here is no valid reason for mandatory vaccinations.

For this reason we recommend that you decide for yourselves if you want to be vaccinated against this virus.