Vaccination victims

Were it not for a bad reaction to a vaccine, Wang believes his 4-year-old daughter in Huai'an, Jiangsu Province, would have had a healthy and prosperous life.

Instead, she is sickly, overweight and shows symptoms of arthritis.

"My daughter is among the victims of vaccine side effects. She has had to take steroids every day since she was diagnosed with a condition caused by a hepatitis A vaccine," Wang's father told the Global Times on June 26, saying that he is convinced these are side effects of the steroids.

On October 29, 2010, Wang discovered that his daughter could not lift her head, just a few hours after she was vaccinated at a local clinic. He took her to the Nanjing Children's Hospital, which diagnosed her condition as the neuromuscular disease myasthenia gravis.

The timing of the incident convinced Wang that the vaccine was the cause of his daughter's problem. "I was confused at that moment. How could the medicine which is supposed to help her become healthy be the cause of my daughter's disease?"

Despite Wang's questions, doctors have neither confirmed nor denied whether the vaccination might have caused his daughter's condition.

Wang's case is far from unique - each year, hundreds of negative reactions to vaccines are reported around China, which is now the biggest vaccine consumer worldwide, with a billion vaccinations annually, according to an April report by the Chinese Center for Disease Control.

A report in the Nandu Daily said that the rate of negative reactions is allegedly around one to two for every 1 million vaccinations, with approximately 1,000 kids suffering from them across the country.

"I suspect the actual number of these cases in China is higher than what was reported. In many remote rural areas, people might not even know their child's sickness was caused by vaccines," Wang told the Global Times.

No cure-all

"When my 2-month-old boy was diagnosed with polio in 1995 after a polio vaccination pill at a local hospital, the doctors and I were shocked because polio had been eradicated in our city for decades, and he had just taken a vaccine to fight against that very disease," Zhou Hanbing, who comes from Ma'anshan, Anhui Province, told the Global Times. Zhou is a member of a support group for the families of people who have suffered negative effects of vaccines.

The pill that Zhou's son took was a kind of live "attenuated" vaccine. These vaccines are made of weakened virus, which, in theory, shouldn't be strong enough to activate the disease but are strong enough to generate an immune system response.

When they work, they provide lifetime protection, though in the one-in-a-million case when they don't they can savage the body and lead to incurable diseases or death. They are considered more risky than "inactivated" vaccines where the virus has been killed.

"The US has stopped using live attenuated vaccines and just uses inactivated vaccines to lower the rate of negative reactions, but China still insists on using some of the live attenuated ones," Zhang Yu, the chief of the immunology department of the Peking University Health Science Center, told the Global Times Monday.