Mary LaMarca wrote:

>The Lyme vaccine was pulled from the market because, in some people, it
>caused an auto-immune response as bad as or worse than Lyme itself.
>Unfortunately, in some people, the body's immune response to the Lyme
>spirochete, Borrelia burgdorferi, starts attacking the person's own cells in
>the joints and other places, setting up a long-term, mostly untreatable
>condition. Some people also responded to the vaccine this way, which caused
>the manufacturer, fearing lawsuits, to pull it from the market.
>  
>
More precisely, some people *thought they had responded* to the 
vaccine this way.  A couple of the comments on this thread 
indicate that there may be medical evidence that this is true. 
Does anybody know?  What I would want would be some kind of good 
evidence that people that had taken the vaccine were more likely 
to have the reaction than people who did not take the vaccine but 
were otherwise in the same situation.  Normally getting this 
evidence requires choosing the people in advance and giving the 
vaccine randomly, so that you know that those with and
without vaccine are as similar as possible.  The vaccine 
disappeared from the market so quickly that I seriously doubt 
there would have been time for such a study, and closer thought 
might find such a study unethical after the apparent occurrence 
of such serious reactioins.  Has there been a study of a 
different type?  If so, what were the results?

Lyme may be one more example of a disease that could be largely
controlled except for the economic cost to a drug manufacturer of 
events after administration of the drug that have nothing to do 
with the drug itself.  For instance, if the Lyme vaccine was only 
partially successful and some people got the extended form of the 
disease after vaccination but blamed the symptoms on the vaccine, 
most of what I know about the situation would be explained.  What 
I would like to hear is if there is something I don't know that 
eliminates that possibility.

[Norm, if I am going over the boundaries of the group here, urge 
people to reply to me only and tell me whether I should or should 
not summarize.  My feeling is that this is a serious enough issue 
for birders to warrant a bit more discussion.]

-- 
Maurice Barnhill
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Department of Physics and Astronomy
University of Delaware
Newark, DE 19716