More than 50 U.S. smallpox vaccine recipients have suffered from heart inflammation, and a former U.S. health official said the immunization program’s planners did not see the side effect coming, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported today (see GSN, May 21).

During routine smallpox vaccinations in the 1950s and 1960s, technology was not sufficiently advanced to detect the inflammation, according to Michael Lane, the former chief of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s smallpox eradication program.

“I think we just missed these before,” Lane said.  “We just didn’t have the technology to find them,” he added.

The civilian vaccination program has immunized 36,600 volunteers, and the U.S. Defense Department has immunized 430,000 military personnel, the Journal-Constitution reported.  The CDC has reported heart inflammation in 24 civilians and the military said that 27 personnel have experienced the problems (David Wahlberg, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, May 23).

State / City	Number of Immunizations
Alabama	481
Alaska	95
Arizona	39
Arkansas	976
California	1,509
Chicago	56
Colorado	224
Connecticut	634
Delaware	107
Florida	3,623
Georgia	135
Hawaii	181
Idaho	200
Illinois	228
Indiana	765
Iowa	486
Kansas	448
Kentucky	767
Los Angeles County	219
Louisiana	1,107
Maine	39
Maryland	719
Massachusetts	94
Michigan	716
Minnesota	1,475
Mississippi	404
Missouri	1,253
Montana	101
Nebraska	1,457
Nevada	10
New Hampshire	323
New Jersey	657
New Mexico	158
New York City	330
New York	659
North Carolina	1,235
North Dakota	414
Ohio	1,760
Oklahoma	335
Oregon	95
Pennsylvania	198
Puerto Rico	9
Rhode Island	29
South Carolina	859
South Dakota	735
Tennessee	2,429
Texas	4,145
Utah	282
Vermont	121
Virginia	843
Washington	512
Washington D.C.	98
West Virginia	734
Wisconsin	745
Wyoming	409
TOTAL	36,662

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