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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
The U.S. military requires troops to take controversial anthrax shots and court-martials them if they refuse. But critics say the vaccine is too dangerous -- and with Saddam's bioweapons nowhere to be found, needless.
Dec 10, 2003 | This summer, on the first Monday of August, Teresa Colunga was taking a break from her job at the local bakery in Bellville, Texas, a town of 4,000 people 60 miles west of Houston, when a local patrolman approached and told her the police station had received a fax from the Army about her big brother, 20-year-old Zeferino, an American GI serving in Iraq. The note said he had been transferred to a hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, where he was being treated.
Shaking with anxiety, Teresa thought back to the letter Zeferino wrote her in May when he first arrived in Kuwait and told her he was fighting a 102-degree fever. "But he never felt much of it. He figured, I'll just beat it," she recalls. "That's the kind of boy my brother was." It wasn't until weeks later that Teresa found out from friends stationed with her brother that for the entire month of July he had complained of chest pains and a swollen spleen and sought medical attention. Army medics, she says, diagnosed him with tonsillitis.
That sickbed image didn't jibe with the Zeferino she knew -- 6 feet tall and 220 pounds "of pure muscle" with the nickname "Cowboy." A regular blood donor, he played on the high school football team and was also a member of the National Honor Society -- one reason Teresa says Army recruiters literally followed him around town, trying to land a commitment. Zeferino signed on for duty his senior year in high school.
Just days before the fax, on Aug. 2, Teresa had an inkling something might be wrong when her brother failed to call his father on his birthday. "My brother loved and respected my dad and would never forget," says Teresa.
Teresa asked the policeman to call the hospital in Germany and find out what was wrong. "After he talked to the nurse, he looked at me and said, 'Your brother has cancer, leukemia.' I said, 'There's no way.'" When Teresa relayed the news to her mother, Juanita Colunga fainted on the spot.
Two days later, after contracting pneumonia, Zeferino died from a 105-degree fever, says Teresa.
After receiving three different explanations for his death (acute leukemia, acute lung injury, and pneumonia), members of the Colunga family are still awaiting their copy of the final autopsy. There are a lot of questions they want to ask. Most of them are about a topic the Army doesn't seem to want to discuss: the series of anthrax vaccination shots Zeferino received right before he was deployed to the Persian Gulf.
For years, critics inside and outside the government have argued the vaccine is too dangerous. They say it causes far too many adverse reactions -- cases in which, instead of boosting the immune system, the vaccine triggers a violent and sometimes deadly physical reaction. They charge that the military is forcing troops to take the shots to prove their loyalty, or for political reasons, despite the fact, they say, that they have not been proven to be safe enough. And they question whether the shots are even necessary.
The Department of Defense and the civilian Centers for Disease Control insist the shots are safe and that the adverse reaction rate is comparable to that found with other types of vaccines. To date, the military has given the vaccine to almost a million troops.
"The anthrax vaccine is probably one of the safest and most studied vaccines there is right now," says James Turner, a Department of Defense spokesman. "Unfortunately, there are side effects with all vaccines." (Last month, the Pentagon conceded the vaccine might have killed a soldier who died of pneumonia-like symptoms in April. Click here for her story.)
What makes this debate more than a mere intellectual exercise is that all members of the U.S. military serving in Operation Iraqi Freedom, as well as the 100,000-plus troops set to rotate into the region next year, are required to take the multiple-shot regimen over many months. If they refuse they can be court-martialed.
For her part, Teresa thinks the vaccination holds the key to explaining her brother's sudden and mysterious death. She notes he received his first anthrax shot on April 13, and then another round on April 27, before being deployed on April 28. Soon Zeferino was battling a 102-degree fever, followed by stomach and spleen ailments, and then finally the deadly pneumonia.
This summer, there was an outbreak of more than 100 potentially life-threatening pneumonia cases among GIs, much like the illness Colunga suffered, and which some experts claim is related to the anthrax shots.
"It's like the solders are guinea pigs, and they don't really know if the vaccine works," says Teresa Colunga. "Our family has no answers to anything. They won't tell us the truth."
The Colunga family is not alone in asking tough questions. A small but growing chorus of voices, including Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Conn., and some veterans groups are raising concerns about the anthrax inoculation. United Press International has run a number of stories exploring the vaccine's possible dangers. Some health advocates insist the shots are putting soldiers' health needlessly at risk, and that the military does a halfhearted job of documenting adverse reactions and an even worse job of treating those servicemen and women affected.
The vaccine's American manufacturer strongly denies that his product is unsafe. "People are running around spreading misinformation about the vaccine -- it's kind of taken on a life of its own," says Tom Waytes, M.D., vice president of medical affairs for BioPort Corp., the country's lone manufacturer of the vaccine. He cites an exhaustive 2002 government-sponsored study conducted by the Institute of Medicine, a branch of the National Academy of Sciences, which gave the vaccine high marks for safety. "There's no smoking gun. There is nothing evil about this vaccine," he says. "Yet people are still spreading myths about it."
The Institute of Medicine study, which reviewed all the available data, found that those who received the vaccine did not "face an increased risk of experiencing life-threatening or permanently disabling adverse events" immediately after getting the treatment. It also found that vaccine recipients were not at higher long-term risk -- although it noted that "data are limited in this regard (as they are for all vaccines.)"
But the study seems unlikely to quell the controversy. In February, on the eve of the war with Iraq, the president of the Australian Medical Association announced that in her opinion there was no definitive scientific evidence that the anthrax vaccine was safe. Weighing in after controversy erupted when a number of Australian enlisted personnel refused to take the shots, she singled out the shortage of peer-reviewed scientific studies. And she challenged the chief of Australia's navy, who had reassured sailors that the vaccine was safe. "If they have that data, the medical profession in Australia would very much like to see it," she said.
