Inhale. Inhale. Exhale, exhale, exhale.

[venta]

Help... my views are under attack! It seems that something I arbitrarily claimed on someone else's LJ is very wrong.

My claim was: everyone (in the UK, for approximately accurate values of everyone) had the BCG jab (ie TB vaccine) at secondary school. It seems that this isn't true, though.

What we need is a poll.



[Poll #1789614]


In not-entirely-unrelated news, hjalfi and I concluded last week that the goverment's current welfare and NHS reforms are not an attempt to undermine the system, but a genuine desire to improve the quality of today's literature. The more starving, tubercular people we have in poor housing, the more poetry we get. Fact.

Comments

[ringbark.livejournal.com]

I didn't have a jab at school or similar either because my school (independent HMC school) didn't do it or else because my parents wouldn't sign the consent form. I know I missed out on one jab for this reason but don't know whether that was TB.
I did have the TB jab before we set off for the developing world. Arm went manky, but not very manky.
It wasn't as bad as the day I had the typhoid and cholera jabs on the same morning.

[venta.livejournal.com]

As far as I'm aware, there are only two jabs routinely administered at secondary-school age in the UK: rubella and TB. And only girls get rubella. So I'd guess it might be TB you missed, but doubtless someone will point out I'm wrong about that :)

(Actually, I think there's now HPV as well, but that's a recent wossname).

[lnr]

We also had a tetanus booster which I think was another jab, at the same time as polio drops at some point too. I think that may have been between rubella (11) and BCG (13/14).

(And I had some non-routine jabs at school for a trip to Morocco at the end of the 5th year too).

Did anyone else have the thing of people deliberately punching each other on the manky arm because it hurt?

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

We had that for the rubella jab. :(

[d-floorlandmine.livejournal.com]

Did anyone else have the thing of people deliberately punching each other on the manky arm because it hurt?
Aye. To the extent that a school edict went round saying that doing so could result in either or both a) a suspension and b) being bollocked by the (rather terrifying) deputy Head.

[zenithed.livejournal.com]

We constantly did this. Didn't the Mary Whitehouse Experience refer to it at one point?

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

I had MMR and polio done when I was, er, 14 I think. The year after the TB one. MMR was a needle and polio was a drop of liquid on a sugar cume which you had to crunch and swallow before you tasted the horrible liquid. So I deliberately didn't chew it so as not to be doing what I was told. It was indeed horrible.

Got to go, the dumplings alarm just went off. Best alarm ever.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

The typhoid one gets really sore afterwards. I remember walking around looking really shifty at people who might wak into it for a couple of days.

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

Oxfordshire stopped offering BCG boosters (the early teens one) about two years before I was eligible. I never have had it, and neither did my schoolfriends. The whole programme was stopped in 2005, although I doubt many 17-19 year olds will respond.

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

In the United Kingdom, a report of a survey of immunisation co-ordinators in 1992 revealed that 15 out of 186 respondents had stopped their school immunisation programme. Fourteen of these had a selective neonatal BCG immunisation policy.

Following the introduction of a selective BCG immunisation policy in Oxfordshire there was no evidence to suggest that this had led to a rise in the levels of notified TB (Tayler & Mayon White 1995, Cohen & Mayon White, 1997 unpublished data), although there was evidence to suggest that the selective immunisation policy was not being rigorously implemented. In 2001 Oxfordshire·s rates remained low, but the re-introduction of routine BCG immunisation into secondary schools was being discussed (Mayon White, personal communication, 2001).

I am not sure if Oxfordshire was the authority that did not introduce selective neonatal vaccination at that time, but it's currently a selective programme and smallclanger was not offered it (in 2003, or since).

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

Can't edit because I replied to myself but apparently it was 3-4 years before I was eligible, in fact.
http://jpubhealth.oxfordjournals.org/content/13/3/209.abstract

[venta.livejournal.com]

Are you sure the 13-14 one was a booster? I thought it was a single-shot vaccination (though quite what was supposed to stop me getting TB before I was 13 I have no idea).

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

My fingers typed booster without consulting my brain, and I probably didn't mean booster at all (judging by the links I've read I definitely didn't).

In my defence, I am currently running a temp of 100.2F. On the plus side, I definitely don't have TB. ;-)

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

You will have had one as a baby that you don't remember too!

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

Not infallibly - it's been a selective process in various parts of the country since it was introduced - see above, etc. It is true that most of the country between the ages of 20 and 50 did, though.

venta probably had a neonatal immunisation and a secondary-school booster. I had neither [I've now checked with my baby book, having found it!], solely by a quirk of geography.

[beckyc.livejournal.com]

Oh, and my arm only went manky. But I thought I should use the other radio button, since you'd been so kind as to put it there ;-).

[venta.livejournal.com]

It was pretty much specially for you :)

[beckyc.livejournal.com]

I thought it might have been :-).

[floralaetifica.livejournal.com]

I remember the 6 pricks. I don't rememeber for certain whether I had a jab as well. I remember the rubella jab, and I think I had more than one jab at school, so possibly I had both.

[uitlander]

Whereas I don't recall the six pricks test, but distinctly recall the BCG. My reaction was very small compared to most people, but still all rather unpleasant.

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

An entire new form of bullying arose at my school, consisting of sneaking up behind someone and bashing the injection site.

[beckyc.livejournal.com]

An entire new form of bullying arose at my school,

I'm not quite sure that your interpretation of "entirely new" is the same as my interpretation.

Or put another way, hasn't that particular practical "joke" been doing the round since people first realised that vaccinations might make your arm sore?

[ewx.livejournal.com]

They only tried from the front at my school. Which, unsurprisingly, didn’t work very well.

[venta.livejournal.com]

So your schoolmates were dim, but honourable :)

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Funny thing is it was a grammar school. Maybe the violent ones were the dimmest…

[kauket.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure. I think I recall have the 'six pricks' test but I don't recall the BCG jab and I don't have a mark which makes me think I never had it.

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

To be honest I don't really remember it. I know that the older kids went around punching the kids who'd just had it done in their upper arms though. And presumably those kids went on to do it to the next generation of year 8 fraggles in their turn. The first time I heard the phrase, "man hands down misery to man", that's what it made me think of.

[the-alchemist.livejournal.com]

I was off sick when we had the test, so I was told I should have it next year. I was also off sick the next year. I didn't make a habit of sick days - I think in both cases these two days were the only ones for the whole year.

(I have a vague idea this (along with my generally pale and preraphaelite appearance) means I am somehow Destined to get TB, though I haven't yet.)

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

They stopped doing them in schools I think the year after my little brother had it done which was, er, 1997/8 I think. Or it might have been the year after I had it done which was 4 years before that. Sometime in the 90s anyway, and one of us just crept in for the last year of it.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

[x] I mostly remember this. I think the scar still might be there.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

As an infant, my parents enrolled me on a trial of neonatal TB vaccination. Don't think it was anything so clever as an RCT - AIUI (which is sketchily) they just gave a bunch of babies the jab and followed up later to see whether immunity had lasted until standard BCG age. It worked for me - I had the most spectacular reaction to the six-prick test anyone involved in my school had seen, so I was spared the arm-numbing jab.

I think there's some debate - or perhaps lack of evidence - about how long the BCG lasts. And I also think that the UK stopped routine TB immunisation some years ago. The treatment regime for TB was horrible and hard to stick to even back in the days before the emergence of XDR-TB (which sounds a lot cooler than it in fact is).

So I have been cheerfully predicting a full on White Plague scare for at least the last four years. At least, I hope it's only a scare.

It's worth noting that TB also refers to the former Prime Minister. Coincidence? I think not.

[motodraconis.livejournal.com]

I didn't have the jab. It's not compulsory, and my parents Had Views on the TB jab so I didn't get it. Everyone else in my class did have it though.

Since then I have travelled all over the world, often to places where technically I might be at risk of catching TB. So far I've been ok (touch wood) certainly it's never been raised as an issue when getting my travelling jabs - for which I am a scrupulous stickler.

[d-floorlandmine.livejournal.com]

I managed to break the school system for that one. Due to having been, for a number of reasons, a North London public school proto-oik, my school, stuck somewhere in the 50s, did the Common Entrance Exam and shipped out pupils at 13. So they helpfully did the booster before we moved to the big scary world.
Then we moved to South London, where schools tended to shunt pupils at 11, and where they did the booster at 13, but, so it seemed, after I'd arrived. So they hit me with the six-needle check in my first year there, which came up nicely (it's actually still possible to see the marks on my forearm). But for some reason, the nurse checking the reactions decided that that couldn't possibly be the reaction, and I must have a non-reacting test site elsewhere on my forearm, so I was scheduled for a second jab, which would probably have gone amusingly nuclear.
Fortunately for my upper arm, my mother was a GP, and was therefore believed when she told them that I'd already had the booster the previous year.
I still remember one of the lads in our year developing an awesome (to a 13-year-old boy) manky crater on his upper arm, though ...

[venta.livejournal.com]

Interestingly (if Wikipedia is to be believed (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacillus_Calmette-Gu%C3%A9rin#Method_of_administration)) the prick test isn't testing immunity. It's testing "likelihood of bad shit happening if vaccine is administered", of which immunity due to prior vaccine is one cause.

I suspect that "amusingly nuclear" would have turned out to be more nuclear than amusing :)

[mansunite.livejournal.com]

At the same time as my BCG, I also had the Polio (drop of liquid on a sugar cube) as previously mentioned by feanelwa

[venta.livejournal.com]

I do vaguely remember the polio vaccine, but I'm pretty sure that I was very small when it happened - old enough to remember, but only just.

I certainly have no memory of another one happening at secondary school.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

My sister, three years older, had an arm that went manky from the BCG to the extent of a chunk of flesh and skin being eaten away and having to be patched with a surgical graft. My parents thought it wisest to opt me out.

My Dad actually had TB when he was young, and nearly died from it (this was in the 1940s). Fortunately for him, streptomycin was in trial and he got some.

[zenithed.livejournal.com]

I was at a talk about TB last week where the speaker thought we might come to regret stopping BCG vaccination in schools. I hope not.

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

Yes, I understand that there are concerns regarding increased immigration from Eastern Europe, where the disease is more prevalent.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Interestingly, although it notes that cases among people who live in the UK but not born here are unexpectedly high, tthe NHS reckons they were infected here (http://www.nhs.uk/news/2010/12December/Pages/tb-tuberculosis-cases-rise-london-uk.aspx).

[shrydar.livejournal.com]

Migrants and long term visitors to Australia are required to have a chest x-ray to demonstrate that they are TB free; cf Fact Sheet 22.

[satyrica.livejournal.com]

I had mine a year later than most of my contemporaries; I have a vague feeling this may be due to fainting the first time round . . .

[ar-gemlad.livejournal.com]

I had a full vaccination as a baby, as I was at high-risk due to my mum having TB as a young 'un. I have a nice ickle scar on my leg, and apparently it doesn't go as manky as if you have it later in life.

[secretrebel.livejournal.com]

Mine didn't go manky at all.