The real risks from smallpox are addressed in several reports released online early today, to be published in the Jan. 30, 2003, issue of the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM).
The messages of the reports can be summarized as:
Justifying mass smallpox vaccination is difficult without evidence of an impending bioterrorist attack.
The great majority of Americans do not know basic smallpox facts.
The decades-old smallpox vaccine now in the U.S. stockpile is not as safe as modern vaccines. But the risk of spreading the live virus from the vaccine to unvaccinated people has been greatly exaggerated.
There hasn’t been a case of smallpox anywhere in the world for 25 years.
השאירו תגובה
רוצה להצטרף לדיון?תרגישו חופשי לתרום!