Why don't they do the BCG injection in the leg?! So the scaring isn't seen?

[omikron]

My friend has just mentioned this and we can't work out why they wouldn't do it in the leg?!

Buttocks for child in Switzerland. Mine, in leafy Sixties Surrey, was in the arm but the scar is long gone.

Another one with no visible scar. My husband has a very obvious crater-like scar.

I have a small scar that is only noticeable when I get a sun tan (vaccinated at birth). DS was vaccinated at birth and his scar is quite bumpy. DH was vaccinated when he joined the army and was the biggest of all.of us.

Mine was done on my heel 50 or so years ago in West Africa. It is a huge, dotty circle. I quite like it.

I don’t have a scar. I remember getting a chest X-ray as a child to do with it.
A test a few years ago said I don’t have any immunity to tb but I was too old for a bcg

As a terrible hypochondriac, it's bothered me for years that when we went back the week after the pre-test the nurse looked at my arm and said 'Oh, you're immune already, you don't need the BCG' and sent me away. No chest X-ray, no follow up at all.

I have no idea why I had immunity and nobody else did, but I have often wondered if it was because the milk we had delivered to the hosue for many years was green top, i.e. unpasteurised. I believe one of the strongest reasons for pasteurising milk is to prevent the transmission of TB.

I would have assumed there wasn't too much TB in the general population in the 1960s and early 70s when I was growing up, as antibiotics and the BCG had pretty much knocked it on the head by then.

When I was younger and especially when my children were little I picked up bad colds a lot more often than I do now in my late 50s. A few times I ended up with a hacking cough and the thought frequently crossed my mind that at long last the secondary TB was kicking in (I said I'm a hypochondriac ). Not yet, though - phew.

Anybody else got a smallpox vaccination mark? That's a real sign of age. Mine is about the size of a 50p piece.

I'm 58 and was given my smallpox vaccination on the sole of my foot as a baby; there is a scar, but no-one has ever noticed it!

This thread has just made me look for my scar and its disappeared! Was definitely still there a couple of years ago. I'm strangely disappointed!

House, not hosue.

Also, we didn't have green top by choice. It's just what the local farmer who delivered to our area produced. Pretty unusual by then and eventually they went over to silver top, which I think was pasteurised.

On the foot! I bet that hurt. Mine is on my left arm, just below the shoulder joint.

I didn't have mine at school because I had a real phobia of needles. I had mine in my late 20s. I had it done in my leg due to not wanting to spoil a very lovely tattoo. Within a few days it wasn't healing properly and I caught my leg, the whole thing burst. It was really bad and refused to stop oozing. I went to the gp who immediately referred me to the chest clinic. He also sent off one of the yellow cards in the back of the bnf for adverse reactions. Fortunately I was OK!

I'm fairly sure I wasn't vaccinated against smallpox and I'm in my early sixties. But mention of a vaccination in the foot brings up very vague memories, so perhaps. I remember polio sugar cubes for sure and I now think one of my very earliest memories was being vaccinated for I know not what (it can't have been MMR as I had an extraordinarily bad bout of German Measles when I was either 3 or 7).
Sorry, nothing to do with BCG, am wittering on in my mind about my dead parents for some reason today and this is a propos.

No scar here, either from the jab or the 6 needle test.

Mine is fairly small and inoffensive. DD has hers at one day old and didn’t scar at all, I’ve always wondered if it meant it was not effective, so I’m relieved to see several people on this thread didn’t get a scar either.

No scar here either. I did react to having it done at secondary school, but nothing left now.

Everyone I know has an arm crater.

I'm 27 and they had stopped doing it by the time I got to the right age.

Apart from a faint purple ring around mine mines barely even noticeable now

GOOD question! I have three little icecream scoops out of my upper arm.

I'd rather have had it in my arm then pull my trousers down at school

I remember some people punching others on the arm for some time afterwards. I wonder if they scared worse??
Mine is visible but small. DD had hers at 11 days old and her scar is similar to mine.

I have a massive scar from mine. It got infected, so my Mum took me to the doctor. He took one look at my still very visible heaf test and said I already had immunity and should never have been vaccinated. So thanks for that, school nurse.

@Coffeeandchocolate9 mine was massively infected for a few weeks but the scar now is hardly noticeable and is nice and flat. I had to repeat the 6 needles one 3 years later after coming in contact with the disease. That one puffed up like mad so I was definitely immune to it

We had the 6 needle test too (heaf test?). I think that was on my lower arm. A week or so later we had the actual BCG in the upper arm, but because I was at a private school we were given the more expensive injection using lots of tiny needles (I think it was 15 needles, but I could be incorrect). Apparently this would lead to reduced scarring. I have no mark from it at all.

I don’t have a scar, DM does. I’m in my 40s, she’s in her 70s. I thought it was to do with improvements in the way it was administered in the 30ish years in between us being vaccinated.

I wasn’t permitted to have it, so avoided the scarring. Wouldn’t have bothered me, but the GP said no, so school complied.