TimesOnline has just published an article on the NEW swine flu vaccine - and recommends that pregnant women ask for this in addition to last year's if they had it.

[JosephineClaire]

Has anyone else heard this?

I had a swine flu vaccine at about 10 weeks - I'm now wondering if I need another at 34 weeks...

No advice to give but just empathy for those trying to decide - you will be frowned on whichever route you take.

FWIW, I did have the vaccination in the end and DD is fine (I'm sure I will be told 'as far as you know' etc etc. But on reading everything I could get my hands on, DH and I made the decision together to have it, sat in the waiting room in tears, tearing myself up over whether this was the right decision.

Ultimately though, for me personally, I felt that if anything awful were to have happened either way, having had the vaccine would have made me feel better than if I had done nothing. Not sure why, but it's very hard to be rational when faced with decisions where it's impossible to ever know all the information.

Sorry, ramble.....

Thanks everyone for this interesting debate.

It has been very informative & provocative, though as someone who is 10 weeks pregnant, lives in hugely populated central London & uses public transport daily, I still don't know what I'm going to do. I would normally not go for any kind of flu jab, but I clearly need to think about it further now I'm pregnant.

The doctor didn't mention SW or flujab to me when I saw her a couple of weeks ago but I have my booking appointment next week so I'll discuss it then.

bumpypaws - I know what you mean I think I felt that I was proactivly doing somthing to protect my baby. Rather than crossing my fingers and hoping.

If I got flu and lost my dd I could never of forgiven myself however if in the future dd is diagnosed with somthing and it's linked to the vaccine then I will still feel that I did what I felt was best for her at the time.
that's just my personal feelings

I honestly don't feel there is anything wrong with the vaccine but I can understand the feelings of those that do.

Fascinating discussion.
I am 18 weeks pregnant now. Next time I see my midwife and/or doctor I will ask about the vaccine.
My inclination from everything I have read so far is that I will probably have it.

I had swine flu in December, as did my DD (11 months at the time) and my DH. The flu was bad but only lasted 4 days. However, we then caught every bug around for the next 3 months. It was miserable and cost us a lot financially. I can't imagine going through that pregnant or with a younger or less healthy baby.

For the sake of my DD and unborn DC (I'm 16 wks) I'll be taking a vaccine if offered and making sure DH and DD do too.

It is certainly not a fact that it has been shown that mmr does not have a role in triggering artist. Hate, you don't know much about it I think.

Artist mmm
Autism

Nope,

But it has also not been shown not to have a role in triggering "stroppy teenage syndrome" as I am sure that some people who have had the MMR will turn into stroppy teenagers.

You are making the basic error of "post hoc ergo propter hoc". I.E you are assuming because some people developed autism after getting the MMR, that one caused the other.

Science needs to prove a link, not vice versa. And the only study that did has been completely discredited. And, in the absence of any reasonable causative mechanism, it is just crazy to keep speculating along those lines.

The MMR/autism is now up there with "the moonlandings were staged in a studio" and "the U.S attacked itself in 9/11" as urban myths that are repeated ad infinitum.

Nope. But there is no evidence it triggers stroppiness in teenagers. Whereas there is evidence it triggers autism.

So not really moon landing stuff.

Larry - none of this answers my questions about the baby's immunity once it has been born.

Surely if the vaccine to the mother doesn't immunise the baby then a mother is still increasing the risk to their baby by having a baby in the colder months when flu is more prevelant? Surely it wouold make sense to imunise the fathers and extended family of the baby too?

what I mean is - they don't make fathers feel guilty about not having the vaccine.

Dueling,

That would make sense to me too. And I would take the vaccine were it offered to me. I would imagine that some immunity would be passed in the womb and some through BF, but I don't know that for a fact.

Duelling.. nobody knows. The manufacturers don't know. You just decide to trust them or not.

Science needs to prove a link, not vice versa. And the only study that did has been completely discredited.

Are any other studies in the wings then, because as you rightly pointed out the measles rate is increasing due to parents refusing the vaccine.
You would think they would conduct another study to completely discredit Wakefield and put the rumors to bed once and for all wouldn't you.

From Wikipedia,

Recent research
The number of reported cases of autism increased dramatically in the 1990s and early 2000s. This increase is largely attributable to changes in diagnostic practices; it is not known how much, if any, growth came from real changes in autism's prevalence, and no causal connection to the MMR vaccine has been demonstrated.[100] The following were published after the 1998 Wakefield et al. paper:

In October 2004, a meta review, financed by the European Union, was published in the October 2004 edition of Vaccine[101] that assessed the evidence given in 120 other studies and considered unintended effects of the MMR vaccine. The authors concluded that although the vaccine is associated with positive and negative side effects, a connection between MMR and autism was "unlikely".
In February 2005, a study compared autism in Japan before and after the 1993 withdrawal of the MMR vaccine: the autism rates continued to increase, which means that the withdrawal of MMR on other countries is unlikely to cause a reduction in future autism cases.[95]
In October 2005, the Cochrane Library published a review of 31 scientific studies, which found no credible evidence of an involvement of MMR with either autism or Crohn's disease. The review also stated "Measles, mumps and rubella are three very dangerous infectious diseases which cause a heavy disease, disability and death burden in the developing world ... [T]he impact of mass immunisation on the elimination of the diseases has been demonstrated worldwide." However the authors of the report also stated that "the design and reporting of safety outcomes in MMR vaccine studies, both pre- and post-marketing, are largely inadequate."[12]
A 2007 case study used the figure in Wakefield's 1999 letter to The Lancet alleging a temporal association between MMR vaccination and autism[102] to illustrate how a graph can misrepresent its data, and gave advice to authors and publishers to avoid similar misrepresentations in the future.[103]
A 2007 review of independent studies performed after the publication of Wakefield et al.'s original report found that these studies provide compelling evidence against the hypothesis that MMR is associated with autism.[104]
A review of the work conducted in 2004 for UK court proceedings but not revealed until 2007 found that the polymerase chain reaction analysis essential to the Wakefield et al. results was fatally flawed due to contamination, and that it could not have possibly detected the measles that it was supposed to have detected.[83]
A 2009 review of studies on links between vaccines and autism discusses the MMR vaccine controversy as one of three main hypotheses which epidemiological and biological studies fail to support.[105]

Do you need it if you had swine flu??

as a slight aside there was a boy on BBC News this am who was born without any immunity system at all. He was breastfed for 4 months and clearly obtained much immunity from his Mum as it wasn't until he was weaned from BF that it became clear he was very sick lad indeed.

Lived in sterile room (a la boy in bubble) for 18 months with his Mum, and then had gene therapy which has effectively cured him. He was the first child to receive this treatment and now lives pretty much a very normal life (small amt of meds daily & a weekly injection aside).

But an amazing example of just how much immunity a mother can pass to her baby if she is able to BF.

i'm 8 weeks pregnant with my second (DD is 13 months) and will definitely say no to this if i'm 'invited' to have it. the only time i had a flu jab in the past (about 8 years ago, i came down with a 2 week horrible, worst ever dose of flu. vowed never to have it again. I'd rather take precautions not to get flu than to have a vaccine that i don't believe in.
how can they prove there are no effects on unborn babies when i hasn't been around long enough to be tested, and probably can't be tested anyway?

Pshaw. More later.

I mean to laryn

banana - unless you had swabs taken that came back and said it was definatly swine flu then there us no way of knowing which strain of flu it was. So yes you will still need to have the vaccine to be protected.

What I don't understand is all this talk as if the flu vaccine is new. It's been used since 1945! The way it's made every year has not changed and in these past 50 years it has been used on pregnant women.

It's never been offered to pregnant women on such a large scale in this country before but surly we should be grateful that the nhs is paying to keep us safe.

I don't understand what people think the nhs' dark agenda is. It's a huge extra cost and to be honest from a supply point of view a bit of a pita. So why do this if you didn't have peoples best intrests at heart?

this explains how the vaccine is chosen each year

I spoke to my midwife about this yesterday (I'm 7 mths pregnant). She said she could neither advise or not advise to have a SF vaccine but I could discuss it with my GP if I wanted to. She felt it was safe though. So I don't know if they have different views in different areas.

Mind you, I had to drag information out of my midwife about BF, Vitamin D, antenatal classes, you name it. They really just do the minimum round here. (Presumably because they are understaffed/resourced).

for you duelingfanjo this is a study done on woman in Germany in 1999/2000 who have given birth to find the immunity that there newborns had to flu. It finds that if exposed to flu while pregnant their newborn's did have immunity also.

It recommends that all pregnant women are immunised against flu in order to offer protection to both themselfs and babys

Does anyone know if this applied to the NHS in Scotland? BBC article references Dept of Health, but not sure if that only applies to E+W. FWIW, I'm pro-vaccination.