Any parent with young children has probably heard about the potential dangers of some vaccines. It’s hard to get to the bottom of what vaccines you should give and what you shouldn’t, even if you have good Catholic pediatricians on your side.
The link between certain vaccines and autism has long been a concern for many well-informed parents, but health experts have shot the idea down, saying that the evidence is simply not there.
This UPI story, however (which I have never seen despite it being a few years old)Â offers a fascinating insight - some doctors can’t find a single unvaccinated child with autism:
It’s a far piece from the horse-and-buggies of Lancaster County, Pa., to the cars and freeways of Cook County, Ill.
But thousands of children cared for by Homefirst Health Services in metropolitan Chicago have at least two things in common with thousands of Amish children in rural Lancaster: They have never been vaccinated. And they don’t have autism.
“We have a fairly large practice. We have about 30,000 or 35,000 children that we’ve taken care of over the years, and I don’t think we have a single case of autism in children delivered by us who never received vaccines,” said Dr. Mayer Eisenstein, Homefirst’s medical director who founded the practice in 1973. Homefirst doctors have delivered more than 15,000 babies at home, and thousands of them have never been vaccinated.
The few autistic children Homefirst sees were vaccinated before their families became patients, Eisenstein said. “I can think of two or three autistic children who we’ve delivered their mother’s next baby, and we aren’t really totally taking care of that child — they have special care needs. But they bring the younger children to us. I don’t have a single case that I can think of that wasn’t vaccinated.”
It’s not only autism, but asthma and juvenile diabetes that seem to show a potential link. No one cited in the piece is suggesting they can prove anything based on anecdotal data, but the coincidence is significant enough that it should merit furthur study.
I’m familiar with earlier studies showing the same principle but at that time the argument was that doctors [generally ] were no equipped to recognize autism.
Best wishes
An extremely good, well balanced article. I would definitely like to see a scientific study on this.
….but the coincidence is significant enough that it should merit furthur study.
Presently I’m squarely on the side of vaccinations, but I could not agree more.
We used Homefirst for the delivery of our third child, and the medical practice was good enough to justify the 90 minute drive to their closest office.
I’m not sure I believe the autism-vaccination link; all the rigorous scientific studies refute it. We had our own reasons for not vaccinating: we followed the full schedule with our eldest, and he had terrible reactions to the shots. We tried some vaccinations with our second, with similar results. My wife did considerable research, and found many experts who believe the full recommended battery of vaccinations is simply too much for little children’s systems to handle. That led us to ask a lot of questions.
We decided to opt out of the vaccination game, and take a more holistic approach to their health. And now, our kids (particularly the youngest) couldn’t be healthier. It’s similar to our philosophy of animal husbandry: care for the animal’s underlying health, and don’t pump them full of pharmaceuticals.
I might point out that there is another large unvaccinated subgroup: the Amish. Would be interesting to know if they contract Polio, Diptheria, Pertussus, Scarlet Fever, etc at any higher rate than the general public — or if their healthier lifestyle offers protections that drive these disease rates below that of non-Amish.
Small populations that do not vaccinate are free riders. They don’t get sick because a large majority of the rest of the population is vaccinated, hence the diseases do not have the opportunity to travel through the population. Amish kids are likely not exposed to the diseases that are vaccinated against because they are surrounded by a population that is immune to the diseases and they do not travel to areas in the third world where there are still high infection rates of these diseases.
Vaccination has 2 effects, the first is the protection of the vaccinated person himself against the disease, the second is the protection of the non-vaccinated person agaist the disease since a high immunity rate prevents diseases from traveling through populations.
This secondary effect is fundamentally important because some people have health issues that prevent them from being vaccinated. For example, my daughter had a severe allergic reaction to one of the preservatives used in the MMR sequence. We had to work with an allergist and delay the full sequence of MMR shots until she was 5 years old. This means that for the first 5 years of her life she was dependent on the immunity of others for her protection against these diseases. Other children have more serious reasons that they might need to avoid vaccinations–like cancer or leukemia.
Because of this, I believe it is a duty for people in good health to get vaccinated. It is a sacrifice they owe their fellow man in charity, even if it carries some risk.
Ben, You could not be more wrong. None of us have a duty to be a ginny pig in the name of vaccinations. There are no studies on the effects of all of these vaccines on little children. I worked for a hospital and you would see SIDs deaths the night of vaccines. England and Japan stopped vaccines for children under 1 year for this very reasons and the SIDs rates dropped. Doctors long said Mercury was okay, but now it is not. Every vaccines either contains aborted fetal tissue or animal tissue - neither of which should be injected into our children. Furthermore, b/c they are vaccinating at a such a young age, you don’t know what the baby may be allergic too. You give the shot, and its too late: they have had the reaction and now are affected for the rest of their lives. There are a large group of physicians who are against the onslaught of vaccines and the impact they are having. Everyone must educate themselves:
http://www.aapsonline.org/nod/newsofday449.php
http://www.aapsonline.org/nodarch.htm
http://www.909shot.com/
http://vaccineawareness.org/
Ben, why should I endanger my children’s health on the (unproven) assertion that it may protect yours.
There is a reason that scientific studies show no correlation. It’s because actually scientific studies are not done. When our second child got the DPT vaccine at age 2, she experienced 4 days of fever and listlessness. Being good parents, we took her in for the booster shot a few months later. She lost consciousness and had 4 seizures over the next couple of days.
Our physician refused to write it up as a side effect of the vaccination. Even the first reaction, which is described in the literature, did not in his mind qualify as a vaccine reaction. Pro-vaccine bias in endemic throughout the medical industry and skews the data very hard in one direction.
Our kids get those vaccinations that are 1)shown to actually work 2)against diseases that are a real problem and 3)don’t have an inordinate reaction rate. That means: polio and tetanus. Measles actually, in the literature, have a lower complication rate than the vaccine.
Danby -
It was the DPT that our eldest also had the worst reaction to. He screamed all night, but the worst of the reaction subsided the next day. Fortunately, our peditrician recognized this as a reaction to the Pertusus portion of the shot, and advised us not to do any boosters.
Ben - Your comment confirms what I’ve long suspected: vaccines may be sold to the public as a means of protecting a child’s individual health, but authorities really consider them valuable for public health. The trouble is all the kids like ours and Danby’s who end up as collateral damage in those public health campaigns.
Joey,
Why is it that the most ardent opponents of vaccinations imply that those of us who have our children vaccinated aren’t educated? Especially when I can point out no less than three factually incorrect statements in your post.
Some of us “stickers” agonized over this decision and pored over material, mainstream and not so mainstream, to reach our decision. To implicitly suggest we’re gullible and in the hip pocket of big pharm and the AAP is quite insulting.