news Two teen boys become the first ever to contract meningitis from chickenpox vaccine: Live virus reactivated over a DECADE after they received the shot, doctors claim Both boys received the two recommended doses of the varicella, or chickenpox, vaccine as children In rare cases in immunocompromised patients, the live virus used in the shot can reactivate and can causes infections including shingles and meningitis One of the boys was immuncompromised with a history of leukemia while the other was otherwise healthy They were treated with acyclovir, an antiviral drug that treats chickenpox, shingles and cold scores journal Vaccine Oka Varicella Meningitis in Two Adolescents Abstract The live-attenuated varicella vaccine, a routine immunization in the United States since 1995, is both safe and effective. Like wild-type varicella-zoster virus, however, vaccine Oka (vOka) varicella can establish latency and reactivate as herpes zoster, rarely leading to serious disease, particularly among immunocompromised hosts. Previous cases of reactivated vOka resulting in meningitis have been described in young children who received a single dose of varicella vaccine; less is known about vOka reactivation in older children after the 2-dose vaccine series. We present 2 adolescents with reactivated vOka meningitis, 1 immunocompetent and 1 immunocompromised, both of whom received 2 doses of varicella vaccine many years before as children. Pediatricians should be aware of the potential of vOka varicella to reactivate and cause clinically significant central nervous system disease in vaccinated children and adolescents. Accepted August 13, 2019.

pathogenic Russell Blaylock, MD on Attenuated Viruses Becoming Pathogenic Again We know that when you inject live viruses in people, in a certain percentage of those people that virus will live for the rest of their life in their body. And they did a study on elderly people looking for measles virus in their tissues, and what they found is that if you looked at their brain, 20 percent of their brain had live measles virus in it. And if you looked at their other organs, about 45 percent of their organs had live measles virus in them Now, when you make a live vaccine, what you do is you attenuate the virus so it won’t cause the measles. That’s the whole idea… that you take this virus and you run it through tissue cultures until the virus loses its ability to produce the measles illness. And you call that an attenuated virus, and you inject it into the person… hopefully getting an immune reaction and develop resistance. Well, the problem, and this is discussed in the virology literature, is that when this virus enters your body and it doesn’t die, because of what we call a persistent virus, and grows there for decades, because your body is producing free radicals all the time, particularly when you get ill from something else, those free radicals bombard that virus’ DNA and it can attenuate it back to a fully pathogenic virus and even produce new diseases. And that’s why we know there’s a correlation between measles, vaccination and things like Crohn’s disease and even multiple sclerosis.