SWEDEN:PANDEMRIX & NARCOLEPSY

to promed-post, promed-edr-post INFLUENZA (71): SWEDEN, PANDEMRIX VACCINE AND NARCOLEPSY ******************************************************** A ProMED-mail post ProMED-mail is a program of the International Society for Infectious Diseases Date: Thu 19 Dec 2013 Source: The Local (Sweden) [edited] Scientists believe they have found the cause of the narcolepsy cases uncovered after Sweden's inoculation drive against swine flu [influenza H1N1 pdm09]. The jab may have set off an auto-immune response that caused brain damage. The Pandemrix vaccine likely "fooled" the brain to attack cells in the brain that regulate sleeping patterns. The cells in question produce a protein called hypocretin, which regulates whether a person is awake or asleep. Sweden offered its citizens the vaccine against swine flu during the epidemic in 2009-2010, which claimed between 9 to 31 Swedes' lives. Experts at the time said they feared the disease would be as big a killer as the Spanish flu in the late 1910s, when an estimated 3-5 percent of the world's population succumbed. Since the inoculation drive, however, more than 100 Swedes -- many of them teenagers -- have developed narcolepsy. The Swedish Medical Products Agency (Lakemedelsverket) ordered a massive study to determine whether the vaccine had any connection to narcolepsy. It compared 3.3 million vaccinated Swedes with 2.5 million who were not vaccinated. "We can see that over the whole study period, we have 126 cases of those vaccinated getting narcolepsy," Ingemar Person, professor behind the study, said in a statement on Tuesday [17 Dec 2013]. "There were 20 cases among those not vaccinated. We're talking about a 3-fold increase in risk." The scientists at the Stanford School of Medicine have now said that a part of the vaccine had some similarities to parts of hypocretin that trigger the immune system. The scientists said that the ensuing reaction meant the body's own immune system could not see the difference between the hypocretin and the parts of the flu virus that the body was meant to attack. The end result: The body attacked the part of the brain that regulates sleeping patterns. "We have long thought that auto-immune diseases don't afflict the brain, but that is obviously not correct," according to the Stanford researcher Emmanuel Mignot. Narcolepsy is a chronic nervous system disorder that causes excessive drowsiness, often causing people to fall asleep uncontrollably and, in more severe cases, to suffer hallucinations or paralysing physical collapses called cataplexy. Sweden was not alone in facing narcolepsy cases after the jab drive. In Finland, 79 children aged 4 to 19 developed narcolepsy after receiving the Pandemrix vaccine in 2009 and 2010, while in Sweden, the number was close to 200, according to figures in the 2 countries released last year [2012]. Sweden has more than 9 million citizens, while Finland has some 5 million, making the cases approximately proportionate to population size. In the past years, the Finnish and Swedish governments have both agreed to provide financial compensation for the affected children after their own national research showed a link between the inoculation and narcolepsy.