Posted on 11/19/2003 12:32:02 AM PST by neverdem
22-year-old Army reservist who died in April may have succumbed to a combination of vaccinations, including those for smallpox and anthrax, the Pentagon said yesterday.
But an Army medical expert, calling the death "a rare and tragic case," said the military's vaccination policies would not be changed.
The soldier, Specialist Rachel Lacy, a reservist at Fort McCoy, Wis., died of "a complicated illness, diagnosed as `like lupus,' " said the expert, Col. John D. Grabenstein of the Army surgeon general's office.
A month earlier, Specialist Lacy had received five shots to protect her against smallpox, anthrax, hepatitis B, typhoid, measles, mumps and rubella. Receiving that many shots at once is not unusual, Dr. Grabenstein said.
"Infants can get five in one day," he said. "It's considered safe practice."
Specialist Lacy had no skin problems or immune system problems that would have excluded her from smallpox vaccine, he added.
She later fell sick with aches and fever resembling the cold that other members of her unit had. When the symptoms worsened, they resembled lupus, in which the body's own immune system attacks it. Eventually, she died from bleeding in her lungs.
The Army said two civilian medical panels that looked into the case agreed that the death was "probably" or "possibly" an adverse reaction to vaccines, though they did not single out one.
Lupus may be touched off by a viral infection, and vaccinations, which use killed or weakened viruses, resemble viral infections, so it was a possible explanation, Dr. Grabenstein said.
So if I start to glow in the dark, grow a third arm, or just drop dead, STOP TAKING THE SHOTS!!!
I'm not certain about those two rates, but the Navy is in the "merge, merge, merge" phase again. FC and DS merged a little over a year ago; Yeoman and Personnelman are getting set to merge, Signalman is getting ready to merge with Boatswain's Mate, which is getting ready to change its name to--get this--"Professional Mariner" (PM).
It won't last, though. In ten years are so, the Navy will say, "these rates are so overcrowded! We have to split them up!" and the whole clusterf*ck will begin anew.
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