A woman who was given the wrong vaccine developed a severe case of one of the world’s deadliest diseases.
The healthy 30-year-old went to a clinic to receive a measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine. However, the medical professional who gave her the shot made a dire mistake.
Instead, the woman was injected with a vaccine for tuberculosis, the deadliest infection in the world, with an estimated 1.2 million deaths each year, resulting in a severe tuberculosis (TB) infection that required six months of recovery.
The TB vaccine in typically given to babies soon after they are born, making any adverse events more common among that group.
Severe complications of the Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG) vaccine for TB, particularly in healthy people, are rare, with about one to 10 percent of recipients recorded in the medical literature having experienced them.
These complications range from relatively mild – blisters at the injection site and swelling – to life-threatening lesions in the lungs, liver, or spleen, inflamed bones, and widespread infection.
The patient, from Ireland, developed an abscess with oozing pus at the site on her arm where she was injected. After weeks of doctors’ struggling to identify the cause, believing at first it was caused by inflamed connective tissue in the skin, they tested the pus.
Testing revealed the woman had TB-causing bacteria in her body, possibly caused by the strain more common in cattle, which is used in a weakened form to make the vaccine.
The BCG vaccine was incorrectly injected into the muscle, though it should have been administered under the skin. Because the BCG contains bacteria, not viruses like the MMR shot, injecting it into the muscle allowed the bacteria to spread unchecked, leading to infection in the deltoid muscle.
Hellbound and Down 