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2 large hospitals refuse smallpox shots
No inoculations for staff; officials underline danger
By Washington Post, 12/18/2002
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/352/nation/2_large_hospitals_refuse_smallpox_shots+.shtml
WASHINGTON - Two prominent teaching hospitals are refusing to vaccinate their employees against smallpox, rejecting President Bush's call for mass inoculation of front-line medical workers who would be the first to confront a biological attack.
Officials at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta and Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond said yesterday that the risk of dangerous side effects of the vaccine and inadvertent transmission to patients outweighs the remote threat of an attack with a virus that has not been seen since the 1970s.
Officials at three other large medical centers - Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, Emory Medical Center in Atlanta, and the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics - are leaning against inoculating their staffs.
The hospitals' decisions mark the first high-profile opposition from the medical community to a plan Bush announced Friday to inoculate as may as 11 million Americans by late summer.
The decisions also underscore the reluctance of some health workers to return to a decades-old vaccine known for its serious side effects. In rare instances, the vaccine has caused life-threatening cases of encephalitis and some deaths.
''I don't like to cause disease,'' said Dr. Carlos del Rio, Grady Memorial's chief of medicine, describing his fear that a hospital worker could accidentally spread live vaccinia, the cowpox virus used in the smallpox vaccine, to a patient with a weakened immune system.
''If, say, a patient with AIDS became infected, that would be a disaster,'' he said.
Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said she was neither surprised nor disappointed that some hospitals are opting out of the program.
''This is a voluntary program,'' she said. ''We understand not all hospitals will choose to participate.'' She said she expects the vast majority of US medical facilities to heed the call to vaccinate physicians, nurses, and other staff.
Many physicians, noting that they are in the business of risk-benefit assessment, said the Bush administration has not made a compelling case for waging a high-stakes battle against a disease that was eradicated worldwide by 1980.
''There is a lack of logic to the current proposal,'' said Dr. Richard Wenzel, chairman of the department of internal medicine at Virginia Commonwealth. ''If our government in all its intelligence thinks smallpox exists in enemy hands, why would we creep up on that policy? We would rush to vaccinate everybody right now.''
This story ran on page A30 of the Boston Globe on 12/18/2002.
© Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company.
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