Vaccines

Flu season is fast approaching and with it comes the usual news of vaccinations, including this interesting news from The New York Times:

Cases of narcolepsy — a condition that causes sufferers to fall asleep without warning — tripled in China after the 2009 swine flu pandemic, according to a study released Monday. But the surge appeared to be an annual late spring event caused by the flu itself, not by China’s swine flu vaccination campaign. The issue is important, explained Dr. Emmanuel Mignot, a Stanford University narcolepsy specialist who works in China and is an author of the study, because a “double-boosted” swine flu vaccine used in Europe apparently caused narcolepsy in some Swedish and Finnish children.

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