Tainted vaccines blamed for children's deaths

By Jane Chen | March 17, 2010, Wednesday |

Online Edition

FOUR children in north China's Shanxi Province have died and another 76 are seriously ill after being vaccinated against hepatitis B, rabies and type-B encephalitis, parents claim.

The vaccines may have been tainted by poor storage and the anti-encephalitis vaccine campaign was run in the wrong season, a former official with Shanxi Disease Prevention and Control Center told today's China Economic Times.

The four dead included nine-month-old Wang Xiao'er and eight-month-old Liu Ziyang from Luliang City, and Wang Shichao and Liu Yi from Yangquan City, both three years old.

The Luliang boys had been vaccinated against hepatitis B and the Yangquan two were vaccinated against rabies before developing serious complications.

Children aged between two and 17 from another 74 families in Shanxi were crippled or seriously ill after being vaccinated, the newspaper said.

Some were infected with encephalomyelitis - a disease possibly triggered by vaccination, according to a report last February 22 by medical experts in the province's Yuncheng City.

Vaccines that should have been kept refrigerated were often piled up in non air-conditioned buildings, said one former health official, and a driver told China Economic Times that they were transported in non-refrigerated trucks.

"Spoiled vaccines should be destroyed according to the safety laws, rather than being used on humans," said former health official Chen Tao'an.

He said such spoiled products had been reported since 2006 but were still in use until the end of 2008 on more than 10 million people each year across the province.

Nation

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Tainted vaccines blamed for children's deaths

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