MINNEAPOLIS, February 29, 2008—A federal advisory panel has downgraded its preference for the combo vaccine ProQuad, which protects against measles, mumps and rubella as well as chickenpox, after children suffered higher rates of fever-related convulsions from it than from two separate shots.

The study focused on children who develop fevers and then go into convulsions, an occurrence that frightens parents but usually has no lingering consequences. There were no deaths in the study.

The panel's earlier position was that one needleshot was better than two. Now it has reversed that, no longer preferring ProQuad over separate shots.

ProQuad costs $124 per dose—about the same as the other two shots combined. But the product has been plagued in recent months with problems supplying and delivering it. And now comes the matter of convulsions.

"Safety, shortages, delivery issues — lots of reasons not to state such a strong preference," panel member Patsy Stinchfield, an infectious disease expert at Children's Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota, told the Associated Press.

In the study of children ages 12 months through 23 months, seizures occurred twice as often in those given ProQuad, as in those who got one shot for chickenpox and another shot for the other three diseases.

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