Any replication of the Bernsen et al finding should also try to use medical records to confirm pertussis infection and atopic disease, as per the studies in the Balicer et al meta-analysis above.

I hesitate to comment on your other observations, since I’d prefer to stick to epidemiology, which is my area of expertise. If anyone else knowledgeable is looking at this post from July 21, let her/him comment.

Just a couple of other caveats to add.

1)There’s also this fairly recent finding (which, of course, needs to be replicated before being taken too seriously)

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18086216?dopt=Abstract

“There was a positive association between pertussis infection and atopic disorders in the pertussis vaccinated group
only. From the present study, it cannot be concluded whether this association is causal or due to reverse causation.”

Which might go along with this:
http://tinyurl.com/6cf7bj

“Summary
The global expression of immune response genes in infants after vaccination and their role in asthma and allergy is
not clearly understood. Pharmacogenomics is ideally suited to study the involved cellular responses, since the
expression of thousands of genes can be assessed simultaneously. Here, array technology was used to assess the
expression kinetics of immune response genes with association to asthma and allergy in peripheral blood mononuclear
cells (PBMC) of five healthy infants after vaccination with Infanrix-Polio Hib. At 12 h after in vitro
re-stimulation of the PBMC with pertussis toxin (PT) antigen, 14 immune response pathways, 33 allergy-related and
66 asthma-related genes were found activated. ”

2) aluminum adjuvants stimulate an IgE-heavy immune response, so you really need to look at asthma and allergy in
a cohort who recieved all 4 aluminum adjuvanted vaccines and compare that to those who recieved none.

Go down to page 114 here to read a bit about aluminum and the potential Th2/IgE “bias” created by that adjuvant:

http://tinyurl.com/6fdpwb