Rotavirus vaccines pass trials By Anita Manning, USA TODAY Two
experimental vaccines for rotavirus, a common cause of diarrhea
in children, prevent serious disease and show no signs of
causing the rare but dangerous side effect that derailed an
earlier rotavirus vaccine, say reports from two of the largest
vaccine safety trials ever done. The studies published in
today's New England Journal of Medicine, each of which involved
more than 60,000 babies, show that Merck's RotaTeq and
GlaxoSmithKline's Rotarix "demonstrate an impressive efficacy
profile," write Roger Glass and Umesh Parashar of the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention in an editorial. "Perhaps
even more important," they write, is that the vaccines show a
"reassuring safety profile, particularly with respect to
intussusception," the sometimes fatal bowel obstruction
associated with Wyeth's RotaShield. The vaccine was pulled from
the market in 1999, less than a year after it was licensed in
the USA. In the studies, RotaTeq prevented 98% of sev