Editorial: "Silence isn't golden when it comes to vaccines"
HAVE a look at your left shoulder: if you are past your mid-twenties it almost certainly bears a circular scar. Do you remember how it got there? You queued up in the school hall, perhaps, or outside the nurse's office, watching your friends rubbing their arms as they walked away, relieved at having survived their BCG jab.
The Bacille Calmette-Guérin vaccination was given to protect you from tuberculosis. What we are only just realising is that, in common with several other vaccines, it may have done far more than that.
There is growing evidence that vaccines have a wider-ranging influence on the immune system than we thought. In Africa, for instance, studies have shown that measles vaccine cuts deaths from all other infections combined by a third, mainly by protecting against pneumonia, sepsis and diarrhoea.
Even in the West, ...
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