A 28-year-old man has been paralyzed after receiving injections of a dodgy rabies vaccine at a public health clinic in Ho Chi Minh City.
Dr. Nguyen Dac Tho, deputy head of the Preventive Health Center, concludes there was nothing wrong with the injection procedures so the culprit must be the vaccine itself.
The victim was bitten by a dog in May and went to the clinic for the rabies shot as a standard precaution.
After the sixth of a series of eight shots of Rabivax II, he complained of physical exhaustion, flaccid limbs and a sore thigh and was hospitalized in consequence.
Doctors at the Tropical Diseases Institute diagnosed acute flaccid paralysis and encephalitis and transferred the man to Cho Ray Hospital.
The World Health Organization had already warned against using the Rabivax II vaccine because it was unsafe, but Vaccine and Biomedical Product Company No. 1 kept on producing and selling it anyway.
