Shedding Myth vs Fact · Speaker Mastery Community

Shedding Myth vs Fact

People Shed for Different Lengths of Time

When someone has a viral infection that causes illness, that person can shed and transmit virus for different lengths of time depending upon the virus and the health or other individual characteristics of the infected person.

Viruses are shed and transmitted through coughing and sneezing, exchange of saliva (kissing or sharing drinking cups), skin-to-skin contact (for example, touching chickenpox lesions), breast milk and exposure to blood, urine or feces (changing a baby’s diapers), semen or other body fluids.

Smallpox, polio, measles, mumps, rubella, influenza, rotavirus, chicken pox and shingles are viral infectious diseases for which live virus vaccines have been widely used by human populations for the past century.

Live Virus Vaccines & Shedding of Vaccine Strain Virus

There are different types of vaccines, including vaccines containing inactivated (killed) microbes and those containing live attenuated viruses.

Live attenuated viral vaccines are created in a number of ways but one of the most common methods involves passing a virus through a living cell culture or host (such as chicken embryo, monkey or dog kidney cells, human fetal lung cells) over and over until there is a reduced risk the weakened virus will make a person seriously ill but is still capable of stimulating a strong enough inflammatory response in the body to produce vaccine acquired antibodies.

Mutated Vaccine Strain Live Virus That Regains Virulence

Sometimes the weakened vaccine strain live virus can mutate and regain virulence, including neurovirulence, which significantly raises risks of serious complications from vaccine strain virus infection.

Healthy persons can suffer complications from vaccine strain viral infection 81 but children and adults with immunodeficiency are more ikely to develop complications after they receive live virus vaccines or come in close contact with a person who is shedding vaccine strain live virus. 82 83 The live virus vaccines currently recommended by public health officials in the U.S. include measles/mumps/rubella (MMR), varicella (chickenpox), influenza (nasal spray), rotavirus and herpes zoster (shingles) vaccines. Other live, attenuated vaccines licensed in the U.S. but which are not currently recommended for routine use in the U.S., include adenovirus, 84 yellow fever, smallpox, typhoid and oral polio vaccines."

National Vaccine Information Center

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