Pentacel Vaccine and Aborted Fetal Cell Line MRC-5‏

I know that this is a bit delayed, but I figured that it was about time that I added this to my blog. Last year I had heard that some of the vaccines that are being used today where created using aborted human cells and to be honest I was somewhat disturbed by this. So I decided to look it up in the National Library of Medicine's (NLM) records. When I looked it up I soon found that there was pretty much nothing mentioned in there about it. Then, I decided to e-mail the NLM to see what information I could gather, and below is the e-mail correspondence that I had with them (starting from the bottom up you can see my e-mail and then their response). I know that a lot of the language in this e-mail may be a little hard to understand, but I thought that I would include it so that any of you who are curious would have the source to look at. To summarize their response, I learned that "Pentacel, which is a combination vaccine of Diptheria, Petrussis, Tetanus (DTap), HiB and Polio" was derived from a human fetus from a voluntary abortion. Also, "Poliomyelitis, Rubella, Vermicelli, Mumps, Rabies, adenoviruses and Hepatitis A" were also created from an aborted fetus. Is this disturbing to anyone else? Let me know your thoughts on this....

Dear,

We received the message you sent to the National Library of Medicine (NLM) asking about published information in medical journals concerning Pentacel containing Aborted Fetal Cell Line MRC-5. I searched the NLM database several ways and only found one article, still in the process of being indexed, which is in Spanish but has an English Abstract. Redondo Calderón JL.[Vaccines, Biotechnology and their Connection with Induced Abortion.]Cuad Bioet. 2008 May-Aug;19(66):321-53. Spanish. PMID: 18611078 [PubMed - in process] To see it, go to http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez/ and type 18611078 into the search box. As you may know, Pentacel, which is a combination vaccine of Diptheria, Petrussis, Tetanus (DTap), HiB and Polio, is the first DTaP-based combination vaccine that includes polio and HiB vaccine components. The polio portion of this vaccine is grown on the MRC-5 cell line & derived from human fetuses. Fetal tissue research has been questioned in the literature by http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v357/n6378/pdf/357432c0.pdf The cell line was created in 1966 derived from a 14-week-old male fetus who was electively aborted. Leonard Hayflick, Ph. D., developed the WI-38 cell line in 1962 also doing research on cells from an aborted fetus. WI-38 is used to manufacture vaccines for Poliomyelitis, Rubella, Vermicelli, Mumps, Rabies, adenoviruses and Hepatitis A. If you want to search for published articles about the pros and cons of using fetal cells, you can search PubMed/MEDLINE using the following search string (cut and paste this into the search box) (aborted fetus[mh] AND vaccines[mh]) OR (aborted fetus[mh] AND (tissue OR cells) AND ban[ti]) Click on the Related Articles link to the right of the citations to get more citations If you want more searching to be done by a librarian, I encourage you to contact your local public or university library to ask about search services. Our library only does limited reference work in response to emails. I hope this is helpful.

Sincerely yours,

Marcia Zorn, Reference StaffNational Library of Medicine

------Original Message------ From: Sent:08/20/2008 17:03:20To: Custhelp@mail.nlm.nih.govSubject: Pentacel Vaccine and Aborted Fetal Cell Line MRC-5 SUBJECT: Pentacel Vaccine and Aborted Fetal Cell Line MRC-5 EMAIL: NAME: GROUP: Student STATE: CA COUNTRY: USA FROM: http://vsearch.nlm.nih.gov/vivisimo/cgi-bin/query-meta?input-form=simple&v%3Asources=nlm-main-website-bundle&v%3Aproject=nlm-main-website&query=Aborted+Fetal+Cell+Line+MRC-5 BROWSER: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; NovaPacs Viewer 6.6.246.0; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; Media Center PC 4.0; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.30; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.648) DATE: 08/20/2008

MESSAGE: To whom it may concern: I am searching for more information about the Pentacel Vaccine and Aborted Fetal Cell Line MRC-5. The only information that I can find is an article stating that Pentacel is now an approved vaccine. Why isn't there any information about it containing Aborted Fetal Cell Line MRC-5? Please let me know if there is more information available. There is information on the internet about this (http://www.reuters.com/article/blogBurst/entertainment?type=entertainmentNews&w1=B7ovpm21IaDoL40ZFnNfGe&w2=B7uKSLYIvxu3zDSUkrYJp2Xj&src=blogBurst_entertainmentNews&bbPostId=BzDiQnMBguaCB3TPU7wKZdauCz6VbvRu4VgfTCz4t6GPDte2pe&bbParentWidgetId=B7uKSLYIvxu3zDSUkrYJp2Xj and other such websites); however I wanted to know what has been published on the issue in the medical journals. Thank you,