General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: I was a child in a time before there were vaccines for most [View all]pnwmom
(108,977 posts)of encephalitis from the older (no longer used) whole-cell DPT vaccine.
My sister received her second dose of the whole-cell vaccine and developed encephalitis and died the next day. One of my mother's cousins also died years before and they were told the baby had gotten part of a "bad batch."
After one of my children had the vaccine and developed non-febrile seizures, the pediatrician decided not to give my children the pertussis vaccine. Luckily, my son is an adult now and those seizures weren't the first sign of a epilepsy -- it was just his reaction to the vaccine. But in the last few years, after the birth of a grandchild, all the adults in the family, including that son, had the new, much safer acellular pertussis vaccine, with no problem.
The organizations that rose up during the decades before the FDA admitted the problems with the old DTP vaccine are still in place. It's unfortunate that there was so much denial and delay in replacing the whole-cell vaccine with the acellular, because I think that gave impetus to the anti-vaccine movement.