baby's brain development--trauma and vaccines and their impact upon future learning

I love the discussion we're able to have here without things getting out of hand.  Videos can bring in nice information and context but there is the risk that they are biased one way or the other or designed to scare/shock the audience.

I'd like to reiterate my belief that there is a wide range of vaccine support.  The majority of people are probably somewhere in the middle.  You can be pro-vax and not get every single flu shot.  You can be vaccine-concerned and still get your tetanus shot.

Many of my personal concerns are about vaccine safety, not effectiveness.  If they were tested a bit better for safety, I'd be ecstatic.  

When many of the "pro" arguments are about efficacy things like:

There are measles outbreaks everywhere

Herd immunity is important

We need to protect the immunocompromised kids by vaccinating everyone

All these trials show efficacy

Vaccines are the only way to achieve herd immunity

Look at this picture of a horribly disfigured kid with a "vaccine preventable" disease.

It's hard to counter with safety issues like:

Safety testing is done against "controls" that aren't saline.  Aluminum is used for HPV and other vaccines are used for the rest

Nobody in the USA is getting injured or dying from measles. They are developing natural herd immunity.

Passive monitoring VAERS (government system) shows deaths and injuries from vaccines

Number of vaccines given to infants and infant mortality are significantly correlated

The CDC has data for vaxed vs unvaxed, why haven't they shared the numbers?

People just end up talking past one another with arguments that they feel are strong and dismissing the contrary arguments because they "aren't on topic" (their topic).

I'm not sure how to resolve this debate, but having a safe place to discuss differing viewpoints is a great first step.

Julian, what were the circumstances surrounding your interest in vaccination? Where did your first concerns come from? I mean, the direct circumstances. I can search YouTube for video clips as well. Your own experience and insight, only you can provide.

As an example:



She seems pretty sincere.

There is a lot of sensationalised media on the topic of vaccination, on both sides. Sensationalised media on the pro side, though, I find, is usually in reaction to unsupported claims made by the other side.

The bottom line is, though, that sometimes I have a problem parsing one person's opinion from a scattering of YouTube videos. I am not even going to bring up their credentials. That's not proof or even a coherent argument, just spam.

-CK

I generally agree here is Robert de Niro speaking about vaccine safety. Unless vaccines are proven safe I am not going to vaccinate.

here is the case in the Philippines. efficacy is actually questionable. and yes there is quite contreversy on this because there are deaths related from this dengvaxia. But our government DOH or at least the head is trying to cover. Of course that's understandable its their responsibility which means that if its not good they are to be blame.

Philippines to charge officials of Sanofi, government over dengue vaccine

MANILA/PARIS (Reuters) - The Philippine Department of Justice on Friday said it had found probable cause to indict officials from French drugmaker Sanofi and former and current Philippine health officials over 10 deaths it said were linked to use of a dengue vaccine.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-sanofi-fr-philippines/philippines-to-charge-officials-of-sanofi-government-over-dengue-vaccine-idUSKCN1QI41L

vaccines are suppose to save thus even one death that resulted from it is unacceptable.

julian Gerona wrote:here is the case in the Philippines. efficacy is actually questionable. and yes there is quite contreversy on this because there are deaths related from this dengvaxia. But our government DOH or at least the head is trying to cover. Of course that's understandable its their responsibility which means that if its not good they are to be blame.

Philippines to charge officials of Sanofi, government over dengue vaccine

MANILA/PARIS (Reuters) - The Philippine Department of Justice on Friday said it had found probable cause to indict officials from French drugmaker Sanofi and former and current Philippine health officials over 10 deaths it said were linked to use of a dengue vaccine.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-sanofi-fr-philippines/philippines-to-charge-officials-of-sanofi-government-over-dengue-vaccine-idUSKCN1QI41L

vaccines are suppose to save thus even one death that resulted from it is unacceptable.

I think you misunderstand the idea behind vaccination. In early inoculation, I think it was the cow pox virus being used to inoculate against smallpox, the mortality rate was something like 0.5% to 1%. Yes, there was a calculated mortality rate, because they knew that there would be deaths. They also knew that those deaths would be a fraction of the number of deaths in an unvaccinated population.

As stated in the video in my last post, the problem with anti-vaxxer research is confirmation bias. This is a huge oversimplification, but the way science works is that you develop a hypothesis, and then design tests, or experiments, to disprove that hypothesis. If such proof can't be found, the hypothesis may become a theory.

Anti-vaxxers are looking for things to support a belief they already hold and are desperate to prove correct. Anything that goes counter to what they believe is dismissed. And most of the "facts" they use to support their claims are inaccurate, at best, or commentary taken out of context, in my experience.

Vaccines are supposed to confer immunity upon a whole population, so that instead of plagues, only a fraction of a percent of people need die or be adversely affected.

-CK

The above-quoted article wrote:The Philippines justice department statement did not say Dengvaxia had caused the deaths, but it quoted excerpts from a resolution by prosecutors that said the 20 individuals had exhibited an “inexcusable lack of precaution and foresight”.

It said the government registered and bought Dengvaxia for its immunization program with undue haste.

The Philippines started rolling out the vaccination program in 2016 in a bid to dramatically reduce as many as 200,000 domestic dengue cases a year. It spent 3.5 billion pesos ($67.7 million) on the program during which it immunized 800,000 children with Dengvaxia.

Justice undersecretary Markk Perete told Reuters that there were 35 deaths under investigation, 10 of which were the basis for the charges announced on Friday.

So of the number of children vaccinated, 800,000, from a disease that kills 20,000 people annually, 0.004375% died. 35 total, of whom only 10 cases qualified as evidence in the case. A case, I should point out, whose prosecution was more concerned with the government approval and acquisitions process than anything having to do with vaccine safety. I wonder how many were saved?

-CK

MMR is one of the most studied vaccines in the world, given that Andrew Wakefield maligned it in a fraudulent paper.  Measles goes into the brain in one out of 1000 cases.  It's not the weak or fragile, it's just random.  This is where the deaths tend to occur.  There were 72 deaths from measles in Europe in 2018 but 110,000 deaths globally in 2017, the most recent year for which I could get a global total.

Pertussis (whooping cough) is the vaccine preventable illness from which I've personally witnessed the most deaths.  If you are over 5, you'll cough your lungs out for a hundred days.  If you are a baby, there's a decent chance you die.  My most recent death from pertussis was an Amish baby, in 2013.  He was exclusively breast fed.  They lived on a farm in Wisconsin, way out in the boonies, and raised their own food.  All his older siblings got the whooping cough, and he died.  That's how it used to go.

Our first vaccine for pertussis was rather effective, but also caused very real side effects in some people.  We switched to acellular pertussis vaccine over 20 years ago and now pertussis immunity is less persistent - you need to get boosters - all y'all, folks!  It's in the tetanus vaccine (Tdap) that you should get every 10 years.  You heard about the boy who got tetanus, right?

Strep pneumococcus is the bacteria that the Prevnar vaccine protects against.  When I would bargain with parents about vaccines, I used to be willing to delay the Prevnar vaccine in order to make sure the kid got the pertussis vaccine.  I thought "well, it causes pneumonia, but that's not so bad."  Then we had a non-vaccinated toddler, 16 months old (not sure how this happened, our vaccine policy insists on pertussis, prevnar and MMR) get strep pneumo.  It causes necrotizing pneumonia.  The kid was in the hospital for a month.  He was in the ICU for 8 days.  He was intubated for a week.  The PICU docs kept consulting the surgeons saying "Don't you want to stick a chest tube in this kid and suck out some of this goo?"  and the surgeons were like "No, we really don't.  You're doing fine, keep doing what you're doing."  After he got off the ventilator, he went into renal failure, because apparently that's a thing that happens when you get strep pneumo.  So, he went onto dialysis.  At the end he required physical therapy, occupational therapy and speech therapy because he'd regressed in his skills.

My brother in law is severely hearing impaired due to congenital rubella.  My dad suffered from post-polio syndrome in his last years.  The diseases are real.  

So yeah, I've been living this for decades now, and I've developed some rather strong opinions.  I think vaccines get blamed for all sorts of things they have nothing to do with.  I'm more worried about the toxic stew in which we all live and breathe and bathe.

As I say nearly every day at work, I went into pediatrics because I love children.  And so I make them cry.  Every. Single. Day.

With regards to the HPV vaccine, for ages it's been hard to get parents to agree to give that to their kids when they are in middle school or even early high school.  Meanwhile the experts were saying "It works better when you give it younger!  Give it to the young teens and pre-teens!"  I'm thinking "look, I'm having a hard time just giving the vaccine, don't bother me."  

Parents are sometimes upset, like "what are you implying about my daughter?!?"  I would try to point out that it's very hard to get college students to come back to the doctor's office for a series of painful shots.  I'm not saying anything about your kid's activity or morals.  We have the kid here, today.  Let's do this.

Then a couple of years ago the experts said "OK, new rule: if you start the HPV series prior to age 15, then you only need 2 to complete the series, instead of 3."  This has helped a lot.  Now I have a reason to encourage giving it sooner.  I usually give Tdap at 10, Menactra at 11, Gardasil at 12 and Gardasil at 13.  

If the argument is "Don't vaccinate because it'll make the baby cry and feel lousy for a day", then how miserable and sick and awful will that same child feel with a case of measles, mumps or whooping cough?  Life is traumatic.  That's why there are hugs and ice-cream.  From my limited perspective, the far larger risk to children is raising them by wrapping them in a layer of emotional and physical bubble-wrap, only to see them become adults with no coping skills.  The epidemic of teenaged suicides is not as a result of a bad day in infancy when they got their shots.  It's directly correlated to the lack of coping skills because parents have coddled and soothed and never allowed them to struggle or suffer.

But if the argument is that there are chemicals in vaccines that cause harm to children, and may be a root cause for autism, that is a completely different thesis all together.  It is concerning that Big Pharma is the one telling us, "Nothing to see here.  We did the research -- we know the science and you don't", yet they will not release the data from the safety studies.  When the skeptics say, "Then show us the science", and they are met by "You wouldn't believe it anyway", that's not a legitimate response.

It's clear that SOMETHING Is behind the marked increase in the number of children with autism.  

Marco Banks wrote:
It's clear that SOMETHING Is behind the marked increase in the number of children with autism.  

...and auto immune diseases. Is it because some smart scientist tried to fix something that ain't broken? IMMUNIZATION  AUTO IMMUNE DISEASES

It should also be noted that the infants immune system is only partially develop at 2 days old. Immunization is introducing toxins, including, mercury, aluminum, formalin etc. to babies 2 days old body. Aren't you concerned about that? We parents are so very careful not to soil the baby's skin and yet most of us agreed to have deadly chemicals on their babies internal organs.

Why would they force us to have something that we dont want? Cant we make personal choice?

Yes, but I think that the ubiquity of certain pollutants in our environments are much more likely to blame than vaccine ingredients. How much testing is done on air pollution at levels generally deemed safe? How is it that only in recent years has the WHO decided that air pollution is carcinogenic?

The trauma argument is problematic for me, as I have indicated earlier, in that the trauma of being born probably trumps a tiny pinprick on the heel moments thereafter; one would simply pale in memory in comparison to the other. The trauma argument is a non-starter for me.

That said, I would love to see progress on those high-pressure needleless injectors, akin to hyposprays on Star Trek. That would probably go a long way to addressing the needle trauma issue. I mean, if we can disassociate trauma from necessary and beneficial medical, and who are we kidding, dental care for infants and children, it would probably encourage positivity in that sphere as well. Seeing a doctor or dentist wouldn't be a source of fear and pain, no muss, no fuss, no bother.

I am more concerned about the long-term effects of exposure to the polluted urban and peri-urban environment than I am about some little prick.

-CK

Marco Banks wrote:If the argument is "Don't vaccinate because it'll make the baby cry and feel lousy for a day", then how miserable and sick and awful will that same child feel with a case of measles, mumps or whooping cough?  Life is traumatic.  That's why there are hugs and ice-cream.  From my limited perspective, the far larger risk to children is raising them by wrapping them in a layer of emotional and physical bubble-wrap, only to see them become adults with no coping skills.  The epidemic of teenaged suicides is not as a result of a bad day in infancy when they got their shots.  It's directly correlated to the lack of coping skills because parents have coddled and soothed and never allowed them to struggle or suffer.

But if the argument is that there are chemicals in vaccines that cause harm to children, and may be a root cause for autism, that is a completely different thesis all together.  It is concerning that Big Pharma is the one telling us, "Nothing to see here.  We did the research -- we know the science and you don't", yet they will not release the data from the safety studies.  When the skeptics say, "Then show us the science", and they are met by "You wouldn't believe it anyway", that's not a legitimate response.

It's clear that SOMETHING Is behind the marked increase in the number of children with autism.  

I agree strongly with your post until the last line.  It isn't clear to me that there is a marked increase.  I think it's possible we have just gotten much better at getting awareness of it out, and it is diagnosed more often.

Chris Kott wrote:That said, I would love to see progress on those high-pressure needleless injectors, akin to hyposprays on Star Trek. That would probably go a long way to addressing the needle trauma issue. I mean, if we can disassociate trauma from necessary and beneficial medical, and who are we kidding, dental care for infants and children, it would probably encourage positivity in that sphere as well. Seeing a doctor or dentist wouldn't be a source of fear and pain, no muss, no fuss, no bother.

Chris, we had high-pressure needleless injectors when I joined the military.  I think you would rather have the needle.

Which is why I would like to see progress in that sphere.

I mean, okay, so perhaps high-pressure needleless injectors aren't what we're looking for. But what of the same basic idea using nanotubes of some kind? Many tiny holes as opposed to one honking huge one, comparatively speaking, should make it less painful, and probably better than the aforementioned injectors.

-CK

Trace - I very much agree with you in respect to autism diagnoses. When I was a child, it was a rare diagnosis. Most kids with autism or aspergers were just labeled weird or difficult, no offence intended. I have several friends in their 40's and 50's that were only diagnosed as adults.

Also at issue, and based on what I have read, more plausible, is the connection between things like aluminum dioxide, a whitening agent in almost everything we apply to or put into our bodies if it needs to look a bright white colour (most pills and white deodorant, for instance, and toothpastes), and also glyphosate, which are known to cause issues on the microbial scale. We ingest and absorb additives like this in much greater quantity and frequency than we do anything, at all, in the normal series of vaccinations.

So why is it thought that vaccines are more likely to be causing all this shit for kids and adults, including adult-onset conditions years after immunisation has occurred?

Or is it that Über-Hubschrauber-Elternschaft (uber-helicopter-parenting) has made it so that children aren't exposed to the appropriate amount of immune-challenging agents in their daily lives, with every surface lysolised, every hand alcohol-sanitised every five minutes, and every food choice scrutinised and ultimately discarded for a product that has been deemed "safe" by the industry that produced it?

Incidentally, and I welcome any who have the page bookmarked to link it here, I read an article out of the UK, the Guardian, I think, that mentioned that a link had been found between over-use of hand sanitizer and soaps on children and an increased incidence of allergies. The proposed mechanism was that the constant hand-washing and sanitization compromised the skin's phospholipid layer, meaning that allergens that would have been stopped by the skin were instead introduced to the dermis, and then the bloodstream, at a time in development not ideal to do so.

I think we have a problem here. I think we need to be really careful about how soon, and how frequently, our children sit in front of YouTube unsupervised. If they have nobody there to help them, they might start to think that propaganda people are perpetuating about conspiracy theories are actually valid.

-CK

Trace Oswald wrote:

Marco Banks wrote:If the argument is "Don't vaccinate because it'll make the baby cry and feel lousy for a day", then how miserable and sick and awful will that same child feel with a case of measles, mumps or whooping cough?  Life is traumatic.  That's why there are hugs and ice-cream.  From my limited perspective, the far larger risk to children is raising them by wrapping them in a layer of emotional and physical bubble-wrap, only to see them become adults with no coping skills.  The epidemic of teenaged suicides is not as a result of a bad day in infancy when they got their shots.  It's directly correlated to the lack of coping skills because parents have coddled and soothed and never allowed them to struggle or suffer.

But if the argument is that there are chemicals in vaccines that cause harm to children, and may be a root cause for autism, that is a completely different thesis all together.  It is concerning that Big Pharma is the one telling us, "Nothing to see here.  We did the research -- we know the science and you don't", yet they will not release the data from the safety studies.  When the skeptics say, "Then show us the science", and they are met by "You wouldn't believe it anyway", that's not a legitimate response.

It's clear that SOMETHING Is behind the marked increase in the number of children with autism.  

I agree strongly with your post until the last line.  It isn't clear to me that there is a marked increase.  I think it's possible we have just gotten much better at getting awareness of it out, and it is diagnosed more often.

I agree as well and I do agree with Marco's last line.  Assuming you're over 40 years old, how many kids with symptoms like autism (no matter what it was called at the time) did you see growing up? How many special ed classes did your school have compared to what are needed now? There wasn't anything close this number of kids to diagnose twenty years ago.  North Dakota did a study of all 180,000 kids under the age of 18 in 1987 and found their rate of Autism Spectrum Disorder was 3.3 in 10,000.  If the rate was anywhere near where it is today (250ish in 10,000) that means they caught only one case out of every 75 that actually involved autism.  

The vaccine schedule really started expanding in the nineties (twenty years ago). I know that's a correlation, but that doesn't mean it isn't contributing to the problem. Autism is becoming so common, people are considering it to be the new "normal." It isn't. Something new and different is affecting these kids.

Here's a link to all the past CDC recommended vaccine schedules if you want to see how the quantity of immunizations has increased over time (in the US).  I'm thinking this is one (of many) possible factors affecting kids.
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/schedules/hcp/schedule-related-resources.html

I am not dismissing your analysis, Mike, but I think a lot of things have been changing very quickly since the early nineties.

When was glyphosate first introduced to cereal crops that eventually became kids' breakfast cereals, even the boring ones? How has food processing changed in the last thirty years? What of packaging and preservatives? What about things like persistent pharmaceutical residues in water systems and plastics and other pollutants that supplant hormones?

And yes, when did it stop being normal for a toddler to eat a handful of living soil, or to play in the dirt? I know, dirt messes with electronics, so it's naturally out, now.

I blame a gradual disconnection from actual life. Allergy studies show that children raised in houses with pet allergens show decreased sensitivity to those, and other, environmental allergens. The same is found with children who grow up around livestock (healthy exposure, not living in squalor with the pigs).

Maybe all humans need something like weekend rural communities, to reestablish contact, and then remain connected, with a rural disease and microbiological environment. Maybe cities need to shrink but intensify, so that we have hubs for people whose work requires them, but so everyone is, like, an elevator ride and a short stroll away from chickens and pigs, woodlot and food forest and market gardens.

Maybe instead of cities, we need arcologies, spires of urbanity that are self-sufficient and designed to serve the needs of the rurality, rather than the opposite, which has been the historical norm back to peon days.

-CK

I too experienced the high pressure injectors in the military. Frequently, since my unit was required to be vaccinated at all times for virtually everything that a vaccine existed for. We simply didn't have time for such things when the balloon went up. About every other month or so we'd all get an arm or belly full of immunizations. Don't recall exactly but the injectors had eight or maybe a dozen nozzles for simultaneous injections. Rarely felt a thing.

Swine flu was the exception. That was done with a traditional needle. Everyone felt that one for a few days.

I've known several people with polio. Only one of them made it to old age. I knew a couple kids with measles too. Wasn't pretty.

Would I subject myself (or anyone else) now to the massive amounts & types of immunizations I once did? No. Would I get the basic proven effective ones? Absolutely.

I'm now old & have been exposed to many terrible diseases. Barely been sick a day in my adult life. I attribute some of that to luck, some to genetics, & some to healthy eating & living. Almost certainly some credit goes to immunizations too.

Modern big pharma ... am aware of those very serious concerns too ... please don't get me started. I'm not going there via permie's.

Not sure what any of this means. Just throwing it out there to maybe help someone else decide what is right for them & their children.

Mike Jay wrote:

Trace Oswald wrote:

Marco Banks wrote:If the argument is "Don't vaccinate because it'll make the baby cry and feel lousy for a day", then how miserable and sick and awful will that same child feel with a case of measles, mumps or whooping cough?  Life is traumatic.  That's why there are hugs and ice-cream.  From my limited perspective, the far larger risk to children is raising them by wrapping them in a layer of emotional and physical bubble-wrap, only to see them become adults with no coping skills.  The epidemic of teenaged suicides is not as a result of a bad day in infancy when they got their shots.  It's directly correlated to the lack of coping skills because parents have coddled and soothed and never allowed them to struggle or suffer.

But if the argument is that there are chemicals in vaccines that cause harm to children, and may be a root cause for autism, that is a completely different thesis all together.  It is concerning that Big Pharma is the one telling us, "Nothing to see here.  We did the research -- we know the science and you don't", yet they will not release the data from the safety studies.  When the skeptics say, "Then show us the science", and they are met by "You wouldn't believe it anyway", that's not a legitimate response.

It's clear that SOMETHING Is behind the marked increase in the number of children with autism.  

I agree strongly with your post until the last line.  It isn't clear to me that there is a marked increase.  I think it's possible we have just gotten much better at getting awareness of it out, and it is diagnosed more often.

I agree as well and I do agree with Marco's last line.  Assuming you're over 40 years old, how many kids with symptoms like autism (no matter what it was called at the time) did you see growing up? How many special ed classes did your school have compared to what are needed now? There wasn't anything close this number of kids to diagnose twenty years ago.  North Dakota did a study of all 180,000 kids under the age of 18 in 1987 and found their rate of Autism Spectrum Disorder was 3.3 in 10,000.  If the rate was anywhere near where it is today (250ish in 10,000) that means they caught only one case out of every 75 that actually involved autism.  

The vaccine schedule really started expanding in the nineties (twenty years ago). I know that's a correlation, but that doesn't mean it isn't contributing to the problem. Autism is becoming so common, people are considering it to be the new "normal." It isn't. Something new and different is affecting these kids.

Here's a link to all the past CDC recommended vaccine schedules if you want to see how the quantity of immunizations has increased over time (in the US).  I'm thinking this is one (of many) possible factors affecting kids.
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/schedules/hcp/schedule-related-resources.html

I understand what you are saying.  I just don't think it's a closed case that the rates have gone up.  Here are links to two articles that, at the very least, have valid reason that the rates of autism appear to be higher, when they may not actually be higher.

Healthline.com

Scientific American

Mike Barkley wrote:I too experienced the high pressure injectors in the military. Frequently, since my unit was required to be vaccinated at all times for virtually everything that a vaccine existed for. We simply didn't have time for such things when the balloon went up. About every other month or so we'd all get an arm or belly full of immunizations. Don't recall exactly but the injectors had eight or maybe a dozen nozzles for simultaneous injections. Rarely felt a thing.

Swine flu was the exception. That was done with a traditional needle. Everyone felt that one for a few days.

Mike, I'm not saying the high pressure injection were painful, but I'm sure you saw a couple of people move during the injection.  That was messier than the needle.  Either way, the substance being injected seems to determine how painful it is, not the method.

I was one of the people that refused the anthrax vaccination while I was in the military for two reasons.  One, I wasn't set to deploy to an area that I needed it, and two, because I heard horror stories about the dangers associated.  I am not what I would think of as head-in-the-sand, give-me-every-shot-you've-got, pro-vaccine brainwashed.  For myself, the choice whether to vaccinate against many horrible diseases is very much worth the possibility of a vaccine side-effect.

Don't know how your local news feed is obtained or whether people tune-in on international news, but a VERY pertinent example of the need to immunise is currently being fought in Samoa, where a measles epidemic has caused about 70 deaths and put the nation in a crisis situation.


SAMOA MEASLES EPIDEMIC 2019


SAMOA MEASLES EPIDEMIC # 2

To vaccinate or not to vaccinate, to have a test to check for Phenylketoneurea (PKU) or other genetic and potentially fatal abnormalities, to give the newborn vitamin K so they do not have a stroke or otherwise bleed to death or not?  Each choice is about risk assessment and risk management.  There is a huge but in here: who is or potentially at risk?  Why do we take out insurance policies?  We are betting that a certain event or series of events will occur, and the insurance company and underwriters are betting that the event or series of events will not occur, thus you are paying for nothing in the hope of getting something.  9 times out of 10, the insurance company is right but 1 in 10 you are the winner by suffering a loss.

To my mind, vaccination, annual blood tests and screening is my insurance, knowing that I have some inherent risk by simply existing.  I put newborn screening into the same bucket.  My experiences tell me that it is much better to be vaccinated and checked.

As a nurse, I see and look after the sick people.  One person being sick disrupts whole families and by extension parts of communities.  I was working in paediatric infectious diseases, looking after a few month old baby with whooping cough.  It was soul destroying seeing this child turn blue every time it coughed and I was absolutely powerless to make things better.  There was no consolation for the mother who sat there endlessly wondering if this was the cough that would cause her baby to die.  The baby was too young to have vaccines and was susceptible to what ever was going around.  the truth is that not every vaccine is 100% effective but as the numbers who are vaccinated increase, the risk of contracting a preventable illness decreases.  My wife and I never visit new parents until their baby has had its vaccines because we are not sure of our immunisation status or whether we are carrying the cold or flu viruses, which a newborn is not able to effectively fight.

I also worked with a lady whose son had PKU but because it was picked up at birth, he was doing well on the appropriate diet rather than having profound mental retardation organ destruction and seizures.  If found early, PKU is simply lifestyle management.  A lot of the cancers, allergies, asthma/ respiratory issues and the like are related to overuse of chemical cleaners, antibacterial products and hyper-cleanliness disrupting the gut flora.  There is a huge amount of research now about the link between gut health and mental health.  Each part of our body is interconnected and so if we are prescribed antibiotics for a bacterial infection, when the infection has gone, we need to repair the gut flora by having fermented foods and pre-biotics such as leafy greens.  Children are being born and not getting a sufficient faecal load to enable them to develop good gut health because their mothers have had so many antibiotics as a result of economic medicine not good clinically based medicine. [An example of economic medicine is prescribing antibiotics for a viral sore throat because the patient demands them or it looks good and the doctor gets repeat customers]

Our immune system is designed to fight infection but in the first instant, it needs to identify that the intruder is dangerous, what it is and how to attack it.  A vaccine simply exposes the immune system to a bit of the intruder so, if an attack comes, it knows what to do.  It is like learning to drive someone else's car before you buy your own.  Once you have yours, you know what to do albeit not always 100% capable.  Same with a vaccine, if every one else on the road knows how to react and is able to drive, you are at less risk of having an accident.

When I worked in Papua New Guinea, one of the villages about 50 Km from where we were had no natural immunity to Chicken Pox and not having cattle there was no cow pox as a secondary infectant to prevent chicken pox. Someone who had chicken pox went to the village and as a result, 20 children died because of the severity of the illness.  In Australia and other developed countries, there is a level of innate immunity which means that the severity of infection in an unvaccinated person will not be as great.

Another thing to consider is the number of people (including children) who are immune suppressed because of being treated for cancers or have naturally depressed immune systems.  Other diseases such as HIV/ AIDS also cause immune suppression.

To vaccinate or not to vaccinate, that is the question?  It is a matter of risk.  If your child gives a child who is immune compromised a fatal dose of a disease that is preventable by vaccination, how will you feel?  Will you suffer life long guilt or will you not give a shit because that is the person you are?  We all have choices.  My choice is to have any and all vaccines because I care about others in my community, especially the lady next door who is fighting breast cancer.  We live out of town so my risk is low.  Hers is very high on the other hand.

By the same token, if an unvaccinated child gives your child who is also not vaccinated a fatal dose of a disease, who is to blame?  The other parents or you or both or neither because it is just fate?  It is an ethical and moral problem that I personally hope never to have.  To my mind, all risks have consequences and if I am happy with the level of both they my conscience is clear.

Chris Kott wrote:I am not dismissing your analysis, Mike, but I think a lot of things have been changing very quickly since the early nineties.

When was glyphosate first introduced to cereal crops that eventually became kids' breakfast cereals, even the boring ones? How has food processing changed in the last thirty years? What of packaging and preservatives? What about things like persistent pharmaceutical residues in water systems and plastics and other pollutants that supplant hormones?

And yes, when did it stop being normal for a toddler to eat a handful of living soil, or to play in the dirt? I know, dirt messes with electronics, so it's naturally out, now.

I blame a gradual disconnection from actual life. Allergy studies show that children raised in houses with pet allergens show decreased sensitivity to those, and other, environmental allergens. The same is found with children who grow up around livestock (healthy exposure, not living in squalor with the pigs).

Maybe all humans need something like weekend rural communities, to reestablish contact, and then remain connected, with a rural disease and microbiological environment. Maybe cities need to shrink but intensify, so that we have hubs for people whose work requires them, but so everyone is, like, an elevator ride and a short stroll away from chickens and pigs, woodlot and food forest and market gardens.

Maybe instead of cities, we need arcologies, spires of urbanity that are self-sufficient and designed to serve the needs of the rurality, rather than the opposite, which has been the historical norm back to peon days.

-CK

Completely agree Chris.  Our herbicidal, pesticidal sterile world is doing no body any good