The UK Government’s Department of Health (DoH) wishes to add a fourth live vaccine - against chicken pox - to the MMR triple shot. Whilst accepting that, for most people, chicken pox is a mild illness, the DoH argues that “it is not entirely trivial”, pointing to the occasional death from complications, that the illness sometimes leaves unsightly pock marks and the risk of shingles in later life.

The Scotsman (3.11.01) questioned the need. It had discovered that cases of chicken pox in Scotland had dropped by a third from 1989 (30,381 cases) to 1999 (19,202 cases - less than 1 in 200 people) and that, in 2000, chicken pox had only caused two deaths, neither of them in children.

See also Chickenpox jab only 40% effective

Ed.- (i) The UK Government appears not to be aware of the US's experience of measles and measles jabs. Thanks to the fact that the measles jab is (a) only 50% effective or less and (b) queers the immune system response to the measles virus, the average age for catching this once childhood illness (measles) is now 15-25. When caught at this age it is more severe with a greater risk of serious complications, e.g. pneumonia.

(ii) We have heard that researchers in the US are developing a 22-infection jab nicknamed the 'Golden Shot'!

Editor of the Bulletin of Medical Ethics, Dr. Richard Nicholson, warned that the five-year clinical trials for MMRV currently underway using 200 children at Sheffield Children's Hospital are completely inadequate.

He argued that, unlike for drugs, vaccines can affect body functions for many years, making a nonsense of the commonly-used definition of side-effects as "something which happens within three weeks". He believes that even a large-scale five year trial would be irrelevant and that any children in vaccine safety trials should be followed right through to adulthood.

* the V in MMRV stands for the live varicella chicken pox vaccine