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I'm extremely glad that I didn't see that video before I got my shot. How is it possible for a vaccine shot to trigger something awful like that?! It's almost unbelievable...
I have no idea how it's possible! I'm surprised it hasn't been on national news. And if it has, I sure haven't seen it.
Hmmmm, well it was on Inside Edition... I don't know if that show is known for journalistic accuracy? Now I'm thinking twice about getting the swine flu shot!
WOW! I have never seen anything like that. What a bizarre condition, especially being able to run normally and walk backwards normally. How terribly sad. I hope people are not discouraged from getting their flu shot though - apparently this woman has been diagnosed with psychogenic dystonia, which is unrelated to the flu vaccine.
Yeah, I'm already flu-shotted, and it just made me sick for 3 days. Not like, sick sick, but you know how you can get some symptoms. :p
When you get a flu shot, they're actually injecting you with a strain of the flu virus... it is supposed to build your immune system up to reject any other similar virus! So my question is what the heck was in that shot that could trigger dystonia??
We need MRS DG! lol
There are different types of flu vaccines - the flu shot contains "killed virus" while the nasal spray contains weakened virus:
http://www.cdc.gov/FLU/protect/keyfacts.htm
You can not get the flu from the flu shot - however you can get flu-like symptoms. Bee got the flu shot two weeks ago, and got flu-like symptoms for about 18 hours or so. But now both her and the baby are protected against the seasonal flu. :-)
From what I read about Desiree Jennings, she did not get the swine flu vaccine... she got the seasonal flu vaccine. Here's a quote from the CDC on dystonia and the flu vaccine (reported by a news station): "The CDC says its Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting Systems or VAERS reveals there have been 5 reports since 1991 of people suffering from dystonia after a billion doses of seasonal flu vaccines were administered."
http://www.wusa9.com/news/health/story.aspx?storyid=92392&catid=28
Vaccines are safe but they are not completely without risk. But on the flip side, 36,000 people die every year from seasonal flu and its complications:
http://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/disease/us_flu-related_deaths.htm
I do think that doctors and nurses play down the fact that you can get some mild flu symptoms if you get the flu shot. However, most people don't and so I guess they are just trying to not scare people. I did feel a bit misled when Bee got her symptoms... but after reviewing info online, I see that you can't catch a full-blown flu from a flu shot.
There are literally hundreds of millions of people administered the flu vaccine so it's not like it's quack science. It's extremely safe, and does far more good than harm.
Oh that is so sad! What a beautiful girl! I have never heard of that happening.
@mrbee, you're such a voice of reason!
I've never gotten a flu shot, ever - not because I'm scared of them, just because I hate shots. LOL! I figure I've been fine so far, and if the flu kills me, well...
What did Darwin call it? Oh yeah, survival of the fittest. Hehehe! I kid, I kid...
Thanks for the research Mr. Bee! :)
Everytime I got the flu shot, I got very ill from it. I might not have had the full blown flu virus, but I felt really awful for days & days after it. I think I had a flu shot 10 years ago & in those 10 years I've only had the flu once.
I believe that the flu shot should only be administered to children, seniors, pregnant women, people with weak immune systems & those in the health care industry! Until I fit into one of those categories--- I won't get it again!
um this is insane. I don't get the shot because I don't like them and I don't get the flu normally - and since I am not high risk, its not a big deal if i do.
Um...I didn't get a shot before since I hate needles, and I definitly don't want to get it now! I'm normally a pretty healthy person, so I'm not at high risk if you don't.
I may be biased because of what I do for a living (I defend doctors in medical malpractice actions), but a lot of times when a reaction is so rare, it is just a coincidence.
Dystonia can be triggered by an infection. Maybe it was the shot that did it or maybe someone sneezed on her. Or maybe she was just predisposed and had she not gotten the flu shot she would have gotten a cold the following week and the same thing would have happened. Whatever the reason, I find it hard to believe that she got the disease directly from the shot. Or had she not gotten the shot, this wouldn't have happened anyway.
I never get flu shots, they only protect against the year before's strain, so I just don't bother. And this makes me really happy that I don't.
That's not entirely true. A flu vaccine may never be completely matched to the current strain, but the CDC says that even a shot that protects against different strains can at the least lessen the severity of the illness and protect against serious potential complications of the flu.
That's so sad. :(
But I'll still take my chances with the flu shot. I've gotten it every year for the past five and I haven't had the flu in those five years. Some symptoms after the shot, yes, but not the flu. Previously, I caught it every.single.year.
It's interesting that people "trust" polio vaccines, anthrax vaccines, and others, but do not trust the flu vaccine. The principles are the same. There are strains of these other illnesses too.
The strains the flu shot protects against is based on what strains are in Asia the year before the vaccine is released in the US. The flu virus starts out there and it takes about a year for it to travel from Asia to the US so within that time they make the vaccines based on those predictions. It is not always accurate since the virus is always mutating.
This is a sad story! So very scary, but this type of a reaction is very rare and most likely there were other contributing factors that she was unaware of which could have been triggered by the vaccine or just a coincidence.
I am not surprised that this has not been more publicized. It doesn't strike me as a huge deal. If someone got a flu shot and choked to death a week later, I would have the same reaction. It is at most mildy interesting, but there doesn't appear to be any evidence of a causal relationship. The news outlets that did publicize it are using scare tactics to boost ratings.
Hi, I'm here. Mr. Bee posted some good information above.
Now, there are 5 cases EVER of dystonia occuring after the flu shot. In the piece something they didn't emphasize was that this woman may have been predisposed to getting dystonia whether she had the flu shot or not. It may have been preprogrammed into her genetic make up.
There are very rare side effects of virtually everything we do. Measles, mumps and rubella shot? Less than one in a million people can get subacute sclerosing panencephalitis... you've probably never even heard of that! Oral polio vaccine? Did you know there are rare cases of wild type escape virus from this vaccine? It happened incredibly rarely, though now we've switched to a killed virus only regimen.
The chances of any of these things happening is less likely than you walking out of your house and getting hit by a dump truck. Epidemiologists acknowledge the minute risk and estimate that with the millions of lives saved by vaccines that it is worth it to our population to accept these 1 in a million risks.
I think it is important to understand risk, which is something that people don't do really well. In other words, we give proportionately more weight to rare but scary things like plane crashes and nuclear reactor meltdowns, despite the fact that flying is safer than driving and that nuclear energy is still really safe when done right (doesn't mean it's the best energy solution, but that's a different debate-- The risk is actually low of harm). We as humans naturally get really scared of these rare things and estimate that they happen more often and pose more risk to us than they actually do.
There is a vaccine fund in this country to compensate the rarest of people who has one of the rarest possible side effects, because public health officials do care about what happens to these people...
But sometimes, side effects are attributed to vaccines that are clearly not associated and have been de-bunked over and over again (autism and MMR). http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/abstract/285/9/1183
There is risk with everything we do. The risk in this case is so infinitessimally small, that it is probably more likely that an asteroid is going to fall through the living room of your house and hit you while you are watching TV than having this happen... but because it is "scary" and hits home to young people like us-- people end up ascribing it more weight than is reasonable.
Hope this helps. I studied this issue in public health school, so have a pretty unique knowledge of the issue.
Mrs. DG - I totally agree with you! I just don't think that the flu (for me, a healthy person) carries the same risk as other things we get vaccinated for so I don't get the shot because I don't like shots. But I completely agree with your entire argument ......the same way parents aren't vaccinating kids and there have been flare ups of very serious, once nearly-erradicted diseases because of it....
The only times I've ever gotten the flu shot were last year and this year. I only got them because I started working at a hospital and it was "highly suggested" last year....required this year (unless I want to wear a mask!) I didn't have any side effects either time, except for my arm feeling like someone had hit it with a sledgehammer for a couple days afterward! 
I've only had the flu once, and omg, I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy! I really thought I was dying!!
This case was so horrifying. Yes, the benefits of the flu shot far outweigh the risks (plenty of people die of the flu each year.) Those are numbers, though, and by and large our brains aren't programmed to respond to numbers - seeing one up close and personal experience like this creates such a visceral reaction, I have to admit it's enough to potentially scare me away from the flu shot this year!
What I found so bizarre in this whole story was that Fox news had a specialist on who claimed her dystonia was probably psychogenic, and they were using this case as a teaching subject at the University of Maryland as to how psychogenic dystonia presents.
None of these people have actually examined the poor girl! And goodness knows I'm no medical expert, but it seems a bit far fetched that this would all be 'in her head.'
I really hope and pray there's some chance she'll improve. I looked up the case and it said she was having some success with Botox injections.
CP- That was my impression when I viewed the videotape too, but without examining the woman, I couldn't say for sure... I certainly don't want to minimize what may have a real biological basis, but the symptoms don't exactly map to a certain area of the brain...
Circus Peanut, keep in mind that psychogenic diseases are very real. It doesn't mean that the person is faking it. The symptoms are totally real.
@Mrs. DG, Like I said, I certainly know nothing about medicine, so I don't want to put my 2 cents where it doesn't belong. I just had no idea psychogenic disorders could be so severe, I thought it was more like "I'm depressed and I've been getting a lot of headaches lately."
The fact that she can do certain things but not others, though - I work with apraxia of speech a good bit, and many children can sing but not speak, cry but not vocalize for speech, etc. - could this be similar?
Whatever is causing this for her, I just hope and pray she improves.
As jocelyn says, even psychogenic diseases are very real (though I don't think CP was saying that they aren't)... This woman likely has absolutely no control over what happens to her, but it would mean that the treatment modalities would be vastly different.... and it would certainly mean that the flu shot really wasn't the culprit.
I'm an RN and I second Mr. Bee and especially Mrs. DG, except that I wanted to say for the record that you CANNOT get the flu from the flu shot. You can have a reaction just like to any vaccine, where you feel like you're coming down with something or just generally not feeling well, but it's because of your body's immune response to the presence of a foreign invader (even if it IS a dead one), not because you've been infected with the flu.
The nasal spray does have a weakened form of the virus, but it can't survive in the relative warmth of your lungs because it can't replicate at that temperature. The weakened virus is adapted, however, to replicate in the relative "cold" of your nose. As a result, you can get mild-severe cold symptoms from the nasal spray. That's why someone who has asthma, for example, shouldn't get it. You can also theoretically spread the virus to someone who is severely immunocompromised, but I don't believe there's ever been an actual documented instance of this.
Just wanted to set the record straight. :)
ETA: Also, it takes two weeks for your body to get the full immune response to the flu shot, so if you happen to be exposed just before getting the shot or within those two weeks, you can still get the flu. But it's from environmental exposure, not the flu shot.
All the hubub and sensationalism around vaccine complications really irk me. I'm a molecular biologist, my mom is a public health nurse- I'm also 8 months pregnant- I've already gotten my season flu shot (as I do every year) and my H1N1. Neither this year, nor any other year, have I had even the slightest reaction to the vaccine.
For everyone who's skipping the flu shots this year- you may want to reconsider with the H1N1. Just because you are not in the highest risk group or don't normally get the flu, doesn't mean you aren't as risk.
Also- just because you are willing to get yourself sick, doesn't mean that all the other people you'll spread the flu to want to be put at risk. Are you willing to particpate in spreading the virus to people who could get really sick and have potentially life-threatening complications? I certainly am not.
And here's why you should be concerned about H1N1:
In any given year in the US 5% to 20% of the population gets the seasonal flu (so between 15 to 60 million people); on average, more than 200,000 people are hospitalized from flu-related complications, and about 36,000 people die from flu-related causes. 36,000 out of 15 to 60 million means less than 0.06% of people who get the seasonal flu die from it (and 90% of them are over the age of 65).
Compare that to H1N1:
From April 15, 2009 to July 24, 2009, states reported a total of 43,771 confirmed and probable cases of novel influenza A (H1N1) infection. Of these cases reported, 5,011 people were hospitalized and 302 people died. 300 out of 43,771 means that about 0.7% of people who get H1N1 die from it (and unlike seasonal flu, the majority of them are under 50 years of age).
While the risk of death seems small, I refuse to put myself at risk (when a safe vaccine is available) and I refuse to participate in the transmission of this virus to others- 0.7% of which will die.
Rekiable sources for those who would like to judge for themselves:
http://www.cdc.gov/h1n1flu/surveillanceqa.htm
http://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/
http://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/disease/index.htm
@rosychicklet: I was supposed to get the seasonal flu shot at work but they cancelled. We can't get them in PA...There is such a shortage on both the seasonal and the H1N1 that it is almost impossible to get them. So as everyone is saying that you should get them and it would be nice, in some areas it's just impossible even if we wanted to, which is really sad and frustrating.
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I didn't know something like this was possible!!
Watch, y'all. It's ridiculous. And really sad. :(
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mScGC7nFDxM