My specialty is infectious diseases and the experience I have with vaccines and any potential complications is working in the industry at a large pharmaceutical company, where they manufacture a number of vaccines. I am pro-vaccination and my experience is learning a lot about vaccine and reactions, and affecting the adolescent age group. Experience in launch of HPV vaccine in adolescents – we have many reports of fainting and seizure-like activity. My initial thought was that it was not a true seizure response but could have been a vaso vagal response, and what one thinks promoted this specific response.
Most practitioners would not have experience with anthrax vaccine in particular, and I have no idea how someone would have received this by accident. This is more of a military vaccine. I don’t know too many civilian physicians who would have experience and routine travel clinics would not have experience with this. Normally when testing and developing they do dose ranging and we want to see what gives the best immune response and make sure we don’t give too high or low a response. Ultimately the design sent to market has a lower dose to make sure it is safe. My suggestion is to get from the manufacturer what concentrations have been studied to determine dosage – they might have studies that show that level of dose is potential safe or otherwise.
I always roll my eyes when people say chronic fatigue. On occasion, it’s possible to have a detrimental response. Many patients come to me with a diagnosis or a misdiagnosis of chronic fatigue. It’s a grab bag category because there are no hard and fast rules about it. CDC has tried to refine it to make it more credible. A few decades ago where many people were saying they had CFS the way people say they are gluten free – it was trendy to say you had it. There is not one thing people can put their finger on and then say they have CFS. I have seen in my entire career 2 cases where I actually believed people had a dramatic fatiguing illness. Is those cases it was a viral infection that set people off. People were normal, no underlying conditions. CFS is so vague and trendy. In package inserts for anthrax, fatigue is listed as an issue, but this is not chronic fatigue.
