Smallpox shot infects soldier’s toddler son Boy critically ill; mom also stricken
March 18th, 2007By Jeremy Manier
Tribune staff reporter
Published March 17, 2007In the first case of its kind in years, a 2-year-old boy is being treated in Chicago for a rare and life-threatening infection that he contracted from his father, a U.S. Army soldier recently vaccinated against smallpox.
The Indiana boy is in critical condition with eczema vaccinatum, an unusual side effect of the smallpox vaccine that can affect people who receive the shot or their close contacts.
Doctors also said the boy appears to have passed the infection to his mother, who has a much milder case of the virus in the smallpox vaccine, which is also called vaccinia. The virus is not smallpox, though it is similar enough to offer protection from that deadly disease, which was declared eradicated in 1980.
The mother and child are being treated at the University of Chicago’s Comer Children’s Hospital, which withheld their names at the family’s request. There is no infection risk for the general population, government officials say, since the vaccine virus can spread only through close physical contact.
But the boy’s diagnosis last week has prompted a frenzy of activity and daily conference calls involving the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S. Department of Defense, and the state and city public health departments. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration gave emergency authorization for the hospital to treat the boy with ST-246, an experimental drug for smallpox that is untried as a therapy in humans.
The smallpox vaccine fell out of general use in the 1970s, but the case could be a lesson for the U.S. military, which has vaccinated 1.2 million personnel against smallpox since 2002 amid fears of bioterrorism.
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The only ‘bioterrorists’ are the people manufacturing these poisons and the fear-mongers engineering the false causes for their injection.
But you know this!