Rx: A healthy dose of reason?

After a CBC News article reported that a man nearly died from his flu shot, hundreds of readers have commenced what amounts to an collective online panic attack.

CBC News reported Wednesday that Richard Ryan, a 44-year-old man from New Westminster, BC, was paralyzed for nearly five months and still remains ill as a result of Guillain-Barré syndrome, a serious autoimmune neurological disease that occurs very rarely as a side effect of the flu vaccine. Guillain-Barré occurs in around one in a million patients who receive the flu shot. But the rather alarmist headline read "B.C. man paralyzed after flu shot warns of risks."

In two days, the article has received over 300 comments written by CBC News readers. (Comments were posted both on cbcnews.ca and on Yahoo News, where the article was syndicated. The article itself also received attention from the Fox News website in the US.)

Predictably, remarks denouncing the vaccine have proliferated. "That is some scary, scary stuff," wrote one reader. "Thats almost as scary as the carrot juice that paralyzed that person last year. I will never drink carrot juice again. Nor will I take a flu shot. I heard that it has been linked to alzheimers." Another, under the pseudonym "skip the shot," claimed the risk of contracting Guillain-Barré syndrome from the vaccine is actually 100 times higher than it has typically been estimated. Many readers proclaimed their intention to decline vaccination in the future.

Keep in mind that a study last year by the Toronto-based Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences (ICES) reported that Canadian influenza vaccination rates, despite more than doubling since 1997, are still too low. And drops in other vaccination rates -- such as the MMR shot in Great Britain, after the now-disproved Dr Andrew Wakefield thimerosal/mercury scare -- have resulted in recent warnings about potential epidemics of diseases like measles and mumps that could easily be prevented by immunization. Canadian MMR vaccination rates were only slightly lower than had been projected after the Wakefield warnings, the CMAJ has reported; however, outbreaks of mumps in Canada have been traced back to the UK.

So, the question is: Did CBC News act responsibly by publicizing the story of one man whose case, according to a neurologist, is not representative and not making sufficiently clear the calculations and balancing of risks that have gone into developing public health and vaccination recommendations over the years? There's no denying the public has a right to know what is going on, but at some point the editorial decision-making process has to draw a line about what is newsworthy and what is sensationalist.

Photo: Shutterstock

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