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2020-09-17 Science & Technology
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The mystery of why some vaccines are doubly beneficial
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[BBC] Peter Aaby shakes his head, as though he still can’t believe it. "That was the start of it really — something very strange happened," he says.
Today Aaby is speaking with me via Skype from his native Denmark. But he has spent the best part of the last four decades in Guinea-Bissau — a small, impoverished West African country with a troubled colonial past and recent history of repeated coups d'état. He moved there in 1978 to set up a charity, the Bandim Health Project.
At the time, there was no national programme of measles vaccinations, so after a particularly devastating outbreak, the team decided to focus their efforts on providing them for children in the local area.
It was around a year after the vaccinations began that they made an extraordinary discovery: those who had been vaccinated against measles were 50% less likely to die than those who hadn’t. "It was stunning," says Aaby — but not for the reasons you might at first think.
The thing is, measles was never killing anywhere near half of Guinea Bissau’s children. Based on the proportion who were dying of the disease originally, the vaccine should have been far less beneficial than it was. The numbers didn’t add up. "We were asking ourselves ’How can this happen?’," says Aaby. 
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Posted by Besoeker 2020-09-17 06:59||
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Posted by JohnQC 2020-09-17 11:13||
2020-09-17 11:13||
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