When my parents were young, polio was a regular cause of paralysis and sometimes death, schools and public baths were closed when there was an epidemic. That doesn't happen now. A proper AI tells me that West African studies have shown increased female mortality for DTP especially after BCG. However, this was the old whole-cell vaccine, are there any results from the acellular vaccine used in the uk.

The short version: the retrieved evidence does not contain UK-specific mortality or morbidity rates for diphtheria, pertussis, mumps, polio, or smallpox, nor does it have the acellular DTP female-mortality studies you are asking about. What it does show is a clear safety difference between old whole-cell and newer acellular DTP.

The 2002 VAERS study directly compared the two formulations. Whole-cell DTP had about 79,400 endotoxin units per ml, while acellular DTaP had only 780 [1]. That 100-fold difference in endotoxin tracks with the adverse event rates: life-threatening reactions were 4.6 per million doses for whole-cell versus 2.9 for acellular, and deaths were 7.8 versus 3.4 per million [1]. A 1996 VAERS analysis found DTaP had about one-third the overall report rate of DTP (2.9 vs 9.8 per 100,000 doses) and lower rates of fever, seizures, and hospitalizations [3]. A 2021 Russian study confirmed that whole-cell DTP caused post-vaccination reactions in 22% of children versus 5.5% for acellular vaccines [2].

On the specific question of female mortality after acellular DTP, the retrieved evidence is silent. The West African studies that found excess female mortality after whole-cell DTP are not in this retrieval. No study here examines sex-disaggregated mortality for the acellular formulation used in the UK. The 2026 VAERS disproportionality analysis of 57,341 children under 7 found that injection site reactions dominated and that sex-stratified signals were nearly identical between males and females [5], but VAERS cannot measure mortality rates—it only counts reports.

The BCG interaction is also absent from these records. One study here looked at vitamin A with BCG and found sex-differential growth effects after later DTP [4], but that is not the same question.

My call: the acellular DTP used in the UK is clearly safer than the old whole-cell version on short-term adverse events, but the retrieved evidence does not contain the sex-disaggregated mortality data you are asking about. Confidence: moderate on the safety difference, not clear on the female-mortality question.