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Handful of narcolepsy cases sparks pandemic vaccine probe in Europe

The European Medicines Agency launched a review on 27 August of a putative link between GlaxoSmithKline’s Pandemrix pandemic H1N1 vaccine and a handful of cases of narcolepsy — a rare sleeping disorder. A temporal association between vaccination and development of the disease has been reported in 15 children in Finland and six in Sweden, although that by no means proves the vaccine caused them. The review will analyse whether there is any link or not, and whether the cases represent or not an abnormal increase on the usual baseline levels that would be expected: the prevalence of narcolepsy — which has a genetic component, and can be triggered by infections — is estimated generally at around 0.045% of the population, and in Finland 6 cases in children per year.

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