August 2011: Children's recommended vaccines

This month, let's look at children's vaccinations. The CDC has two recommended immunization schedules, for ages 0-6 and ages 7-18. How do these vaccines affect our children?

To find out, we will use MedAlerts to look at serious VAERS events in these age groups. Serious VAERS events (those that are life-threatening, involve hospitalization, permanent disability, or death) are important measures of a vaccine's safety.

To do the search, make a graph of Vaccine Type. Then, in Section 4 of the search form, check Serious in the upper-left and in Section 5 of the search form, click on Age (Range) and specify a range of ages in the From and To fields:

• To see children ages 0-6, set From to 0 and To to 7. Note that the "To" field is the upper bound, so making it 7 requests everything below 7, or 0-6.
• To see children ages 7-18, set From to 7 and To to 19.

The two graphs are shown below (with only the recommended vaccines shown).

As you can see, children age 0-6 years are reporting the most VAERS events following a DTP vaccination.

Children ages 7-18 years are significantly affected by the Human Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination. Note that HPV is already associated with over 100 deaths, and is not limited to girls (there are three reports of boys who have died following an HPV vaccination). This is not the most widely given vaccination for 7-18 year olds, but it appears frequently in VAERS and is associated with serious adverse effects.

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