For more than thirty years the Danish-founded research group, the Bandim Health Project, BHP, has operated in one of the world’s poorest developing countries: Guinea-Bissau in West Africa. BHP has build up a database on more than 200,000 women and children to investigate the real-life effects of health interventions.
In the late 1980s BHP showed that the new high-dose measles vaccine which was introduced in low-income countries was associated with a two-fold increase in mortality among girls. After similar reports from other countries, the vaccine was – surprisingly quietly – withdrawn by the World Health Organisation, WHO. Based on BHP’s figures, had it not been withdrawn, it could have cost at least half a million additional female deaths per year in Africa alone.
The vaccine protected fully against measles, so the observation indicated that vaccines could have other, ‘non-specific’ sex-differential effects; and this led the researchers at BHP to study other vaccines for their potential non-specific effects. Subsequent studies have indicated that all vaccines may have non-specific effects; most of them are, fortunately, very beneficial, so the vaccines actually increase survival more than could be expected.
These findings are very controversial, and many researchers, and the WHO, have refused to believe them. To this day the group continues to struggle to get their pioneering observations accepted; not least because if the vaccines have non-specific effects along with the specific disease-protective effects, the potential to improve child survival is very high.
It was only recently that BHP’s struggle finally paid off in some way. In April 2014 the WHO decided that more research into non-specific effects of vaccines was warranted. It’s BHP’s hope that this is the first step towards a more general acceptance of the existence of non-specific effects.
It has been such a great honour for me to be invited to follow the BHP research group for a period of two years. I feel I have witnessed the genesis of a revolutionary scientific breakthrough. I have no doubt that BHP’s research will one day soon change our view on the current vaccination programme forever. With this novel I hope I have contributed just a little to this awareness.
Read more at www.bandim.org
Sissel-Jo
Berlin, 28 August 2014