Vaccine for whooping cough does not give strong enough immunity

[Shiloh]

Source: http://www.digitaljournal.com/life/...ed-vaccine-has-been-outsmarted/article/422175
Vaccine for whooping cough does not give strong enough immunity
By Karen Graham 1 hour ago in Health

There has been a global resurgence in the number of cases of whooping cough in the past decade. Researchers say this may be because the bacterium that causes the disease has been able to outsmart the current vaccine being used.
In 2012 in the U.K. and Wales, almost 10,000 cases of whooping cough were confirmed, leading to the death of 14 infants under three months of age. This led scientists to examine the genetic makeup of the pertussis bacterium that causes whooping cough. The results of that study found that parts of the bacteria the vaccine "primes" the immune system to recognize and fight the pertussis have changed...

 

[Emily]

The full text is available for this research. To me it suggests that more is going on than simple vaccine induced virus evolution. Some other factor affecting hosts seems to have become evident during 1999-2004 as ACV replaced WCV. This is about the time frame that anti-NMDAR encephalitis cases were noticed, I think. What is really going on could be very hard to figure out. Human immune system evolution could be a driver.

• Katie L. Sealey,
• Simon R. Harris,
• Norman K. Fry,
• Laurence D. Hurst,
• Andrew R. Gorringe,
• Julian Parkhill,
• and Andrew Preston

Editor's choice: Genomic analysis of isolates from the UK 2012 pertussis outbreak reveals that vaccine antigen genes are unusually fast evolving J Infect Dis. first published online December 8, 2014 doi:10.1093/infdis/jiu665
...
Of particular importance is that we calculated that ACV antigen gene evolution rates have increased significantly
since the introduction of ACVs, the first demonstration of this effect. This might suggest that the use of ACVs has increased selection pressure on ACV antigens, selecting for ACV antigen gene variants. However, we also calculated that while the frequency of SM in ACV antigen genes was significantly higher in ACV era strains compared to older strains, the frequency of NSM was on the edge of significance (P=0.051). In turn this suggests that selection pressure from vaccine-mediated immunity is not the sole driving force for ACV antigen gene variation. A different interpretation is that the mutation rate of ACV antigen genes has increased since the introduction of ACVs[/QUOTE]

http://jid.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2014/12/08/infdis.jiu665.abstract​