Four infants die after measles vaccination in Maharashtra

Aurangabad (Maharashtra), Sep 27 (IANS) Four infants died and six others were gasping for life in a government hospital here Saturday, a day after they were administered a measles vaccine at a primary health centre.

The four children killed, Kalyani Baburao Gaikwad, Krishna Somnath Gaikwad, Shubham Nagesh Gaikwad and Pramod Raghunath Gaikwad, all less than a year old, were rushed to the government hospital as they took ill following inoculation of the vaccine at the Jategaon primary health centre in Waghola village near here.

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Even as frantic efforts were on to save the lives of the six seriously ill children who too were given the vaccine from the same batch, the health department set up a three-man committee of paediatricians A.P. Kulkarni, L.S. Deshpande and A.K. Bindu to probe the tragic incident, hospital sources said.

While neither hospital dean Nandkumar Dravid nor any health department officer was available to give details like the number of children in the district given the vaccination and the status of their health, unconfirmed reports said all 40,000 vaccines supplied in the district are being withdrawn.

"The vaccine, kept in the cold storage, could have got spoilt because of long hours of power outage or something might have gone wrong while mixing the vaccine," a hospital source said indicating that the problem could be localized, restricted to one batch.