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When a medical treatment turns out to have an unexpected side effect, it’s usually bad news.
But sometimes side effects are welcome – that’s when they are health benefits. That seems to be happening in the case of the shingles vaccine, recommended for older people.
People who have had this jab have a lower rate of some completely unexpected conditions, including heart attacks and strokes, a study found this week.
Here’s what’s going on – as well as three other everyday vaccines that give benefits on top of their original function.
Shingles jab cuts heart attacks
Shingles is a peculiar illness, as it is caused by the same virus responsible for chicken pox, which lies dormant for decades in nerves near the spine.
Shingles happens because when people get older or their immune systems weaken, the virus wakes up and travels back down the nerves to the skin, where it causes a painful rash and blisters.
The shingles vaccine works by revving up the immune response against the virus, which stops it from reactivating.
A few years ago, health services switched from using one type of shingles vaccine to a second more effective one, and it is this new type, called Shingrix, that seems to protect the heart, according to research published in the journal, Nature Medicine.
Rates of heart disease and strokes were 9 per cent lower over seven years in Americans who got the new shingles vaccine compared with those who were vaccinated before the switchover, which began in 2017.
This cuts heart disease by about the same amount as when people take a daily tablet to lower their blood pressure, said researcher Dr Maxime Taquet, associate professor at the University of Oxford. “It might be the first vaccine that protects the heart,” he said.
Dr Taquet cautioned that the results are not conclusive, and need to be confirmed in randomised trials, which are ongoing.
If the effect is real, it might happen because reactivation of the chicken pox virus damages the heart. Or an ingredient in the vaccine might reduce inflammation of blood vessels. Inflammation makes plaques more likely to rupture, leading to blood clots that cause heart attacks.
MMR jab avoids ‘immune amnesia’
An infection with measles is bad enough, requiring a stay in hospital in one in five people who get infected.
A lesser known consequence is that, as well as causing the hallmark blotchy rash and fever, measles also infects immune “memory” cells, reducing the immunity that children have built up against previous viruses and bacteria. This is called immune amnesia.
That means that the MMR jab, not only protects against measles itself, but over the following years cuts the rate at which children fall prey to ear infections, diarrhoea and pneumonia.
The immune amnesia from measles was only discovered in 2019, after an outbreak of the virus in a Dutch Christian community that shuns vaccines. A bout of measles cut the number of different antibodies they had by a third.
TB vaccine can treat cancer
The vaccine against the lung disease tuberculosis or TB is one of the world’s oldest, having been developed in the 1920s. It is a weakened form of a bacterium that causes TB in cattle, closely related to the human version.
While many British adults still have a small round scar on their arm from the jab, its routine use was phased out around 2005. Falling rates of TB meant it could instead be given only to children with family from countries where rates are higher as well as other high-risk groups.
But the vaccine has another surprising use. It has been turned into a treatment for bladder cancer.
After surgery to remove the tumour, a liquid containing the TB vaccine is put into the bladder through a catheter, for several weeks or months.
Patients need to take precautions to make sure they don’t then pass on bovine TB to other household members, by bleaching the toilet after use.
The vaccine seems to work by attracting immune cells into the bladder to fight off the bacteria. These then also start recognising and killing cancer cells.
Cervical cancer jab stops throat cancer
Cervical cancer is caused by a virus, called HPV, that takes years to change from a lingering infection, passed on by sex, into a malignancy that can kill.
The HPV vaccine is now given to both girls and boys (Photo: Witthaya Prasongsin/Getty Images/Moment RF)Because of its viral origins it can be prevented by a vaccine, given to teenagers, before they start having sex.
But its impact has turned out to be greater than originally expected. The same virus is also responsible for some cancers of the penis and anus, as well as throat cancer, as it can be passed on by oral sex. The virus also causes genital warts.
That is why, although the vaccine was first offered just to teenage girls, it is now recommended for both males and females
Rates of throat cancer are currently on the rise in people over 50, even though smoking rates (another key cause of these tumours) are declining. That is probably because of people starting to have more oral sex, decades ago.
It is too soon to see any effect of the HPV vaccine on throat cancer rates – modelling studies suggest this will start happening in about 20 years.
But showing how effective the vaccine is against stopping the virus being spread during sex, rates of cervical cancer in women under 25 in England fell to zero in the four years to 2024, according to a study from June.
Based on previous years, an estimated 23 women in this age group would have died without vaccination having been introduced.
“This study provides the strongest national evidence to date that the vaccine is saving lives,” said a spokesperson for Cancer Research UK.
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