Combination vaccines with whole cell pertussis

While pertussis was thought to have been eradicated entirely from the United States, in recent years the disease has made a comeback and resulted in fatalities. At the same time, many parents have declined to vaccinate their children against the disease for fear of side effects;  however, most side effects of the vaccination are moderate and severe problems closely following DPT immunization happen very rarely. These include a serious allergic reaction, prolonged seizures, a decrease in consciousness, lasting brain disease, or death. A study published in the journal Pediatrics in 2009 concluded that the largest risk among unvaccinated children is the disease the vaccination is designed to protect against.

British research in the 1980s into whole-cell DTP, which is now rarely available in developed countries, suggested that such severe neurologic events occur after approximately 1 in 140,000 doses of the DPT vaccine (0.0007%). Most of the reactions to whole-cell DPT injection are thought to be from the pertussis component.

In 1994, the Institute of Medicine of the US National Academy of Sciences published a report stating that if the first symptoms of neurological damage occurred within the first seven days following vaccination with whole-cell pertussis vaccine, the evidence was compatible with the possibility that it could be the cause of permanent brain damage in otherwise apparently healthy children. It continued by stating. DTP vaccination has different pros & cons depending on the nature, place, and surrounding.

This serious acute neurologic response to whole-cell DPT is a rare event. The estimated excess risk ranged from 0 to 10.5 per million immunizations (IOM, 1991). The committee stresses that this is not the strongest statement regarding causality; the evidence does not "establish" or "prove" a causal relation....

The evidence remains insufficient to indicate the presence or absence of a causal relation between DPT and chronic nervous system dysfunction under any other circumstances. That is, because the NCES is the only systematic study of chronic nervous system dysfunctions after DPT, the committee can only comment on the causal relation between DPT and those chronic nervous system dysfunctions under the conditions studied by the NCES. In particular, the chronic dysfunctions associated with DPT followed a serious acute neurologic illness that occurred in children within 7 days after receiving DPT.

Moderate reactions to DTP vaccines occur in 0.1% to 1.0% of children and include ongoing crying (for three hours or more), a high fever (up to 40 °C / 105 °F), and an unusual, high-pitched crying.

Since 2002, whole-cell pertussis vaccines are no longer used in the US.

(source: wikipedia)