A Mother's Guide to Raising Healthy Children--Naturally (5 page)

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Authors: Sue Frederick

Tags: #Health & Fitness, #Women's Health, #test

BOOK: A Mother's Guide to Raising Healthy Children--Naturally
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Barbara Fisher, coauthor of
DPT: A Shot in the Dark
with Harris Coulter, a book on the dangers of the DPT (diptheria-pertussis-tetanus) shot, is concerned about the lack of longitudinal systemic studies examining the long-term effects of vaccines on children. Fisher and other parents involved with the National Vaccine Information Center helped pass the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986, which awards money to families with children who are left permanently brain damaged or dead as a result of a vaccine reaction. By fall 1996, the federal vaccine injury compensation program had awarded over $700 million to more than 1,000 families.
Parents really don't understand that they are risking their children's health when they take them in for vaccinations, says Williams. Although the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) lists immediate reactions to vaccinations that include seizures, brain damage, and death, the long-term effects, such as learning disabilities and a damaged immune system, are harder to track yet may be the most dangerous of all.
"We really don't know how many children are injured by vaccinations each year because there's never been a large-scale study to find out," Williams continues. "In 1986, [the National Vaccine Information Center] helped pass legislation that made it mandatory for physicians to report vaccine injuries. The FDA is now receiving 14,000 reports of vaccination injuries per year. But the FDA estimates that this is only 10 percent of the actual injuries occurring."
Harris Coulter, Ph.D., author of
Vaccination, Social Violence, and Criminality,
believes vaccines cause brain injury that leads to allergies, autism, dyslexia, learning disabilities, and behavioral disorders. Vaccines damage the developing myelination process of the nervous system in children. This assault causes an allergic encephalitis (inflammation of the brain) with widespread effects. The developmental problems caused by vaccines occur in a large percentage of children. His theories are based on the dramatic increase in autism, minimal brain damage, and learning disorders since the introduction of vaccines.
"Parents need to get informed. It's another important health decision, like breast-feeding or natural childbirth, that parents need to make before their child is born," says Williams. "When their baby is only twelve hours old, he'll be given the hepatitis B shot unless the parents intervene. You need to have already done your research by then."
 
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One Parent's Story
In 1980, a mother who was unaware of the dangers of immunizations took her extremely bright and healthy two-and-a-half-year-old son for his fourth DPT shot. ''He was so smart, already learning his numbers and letters. He played with a deck of cards and could name all of the numbers on the cards. He spoke in full sentences at two years old," remembers Barbara Fisher. Four hours after the vaccination, her son lapsed into convulsions and what's commonly called classic collapse shock reaction. "He slept without moving for six hours and didn't recognize me or know where he was." From then on, he was constantly sick, stopped eating, stopped growing, and wouldn't look at letters or numbers. Later he was diagnosed with brain inflammation causing neurological damage that resulted in numerous severe learning disabilities, including dyslexia. He has spent all of his school years in special institutions for the learning impaired.
Since then, Fisher has spent most of her time gathering information about the dangers of immunizations and trying to educate parents before they decide to immunize. She believes the health care and pharmaceutical industries have financial motives that "sacrifice a certain percentage of the population for the good of the community at large." She disagrees with physicians who argue that it's acceptable for a percentage of children receiving vaccinations to be injured in order to prevent widespread epidemics. "If your child is injured or killed by a vaccine, you and your family will live with that for the rest of your life. You must educate yourself about the risks."
Fisher believes the vaccine debate is at the center of the growing natural health care movement demanding that people take control of their own health care by educating themselves and making good choices. "We want to enhance the immune system, not destroy it. For the past fifty years we've used vaccinations as the cornerstone of preventive medicine, and coinciding with that is the advent of chronic illnesses, such as a 300 percent increase in epilepsy, asthma, learning disabilities, attention deficit disorder, and multiple sclerosis. These chronic, debilitating diseases are on the rise, and there are no scientific studies to see if multiple vaccinations in the early years of lifewhen the immune system is still being formedcould be a factor. We need a long-term clinical study on the effects of vaccinations on the human immune system."
 
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Disease mutation is another concern. A person who contracts a natural form of a disease and survives it has permanent immunity. Yet Fisher says vaccines provide only temporary immunity: "Vaccine failure will become a major problem, as we've seen with measles. Measles has mutated into a more serious form of the illness. When babies are no longer protected by their mother's antibodies because their mothers have only been vaccinated and have no permanent antibodies to give them, infants are going to get a more severe form of measles. This is already happening. Because they didn't do the long-term scientific studies to begin with, the medical establishment didn't anticipate these problems."
The Vaccination Industry
Advocates in the growing movement to change our nation's immunization policy claim that the financial security of the drug companies is at the heart of the mandatory vaccine program in our country. Numerous disturbing facts have led to this accusation. Did you know that the booming vaccine industry (with estimated revenues of more than $1 billion a year in the United States alone) downplayed the fact that DPT shots caused brain damage at the rate of one case for every 62,000 fully immunized children? And did you know these shots kill at least two to four children a year and perhaps as many as 900 a yearincluding a number of misclassified SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome) victims, according to the National Vaccine Information Center?
Furthermore, a new, safer vaccine called the acellular DPT vaccine (DTaP), which is just now being offered to parents, has been available for decades and could have prevented numerous deaths and injuries. American pharmaceutical companies initially decided not to bring this safer vaccine to market because it would increase production costs and lower the drug's 50 percent profit margins, according to
Money
magazine.
Did you know that the only cause of polio in the United States for the past eighteen years has been the oral polio vaccine (OPV), which contains live poliovirus? There are no plans to take it off the market. Even people who were fully vaccinated against polio when they were children are susceptible to catching "contact polio" from recently vaccinated children. Why is this vaccine still given to 98 percent of the 20 million children who receive
 
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annual polio vaccinations in the United States? The inactivated polio vaccine (IPV), which is injected and is twice as costly to make, does not cause polio. Could there be a financial motive behind the pharmaceutical companies' insistence that the oral polio vaccine is still worth the risk? Yes, according to
Money
magazine.
Here's another frightening example: Even though the IPV does not cause polio, both it and the OPV are commonly made from monkey tissue, which contains viruses that are potentially harmful to humans. Yet a safer IPV using human tissue is available in Canada. The Canadian vaccine is, of course, more costly to produce.
"The pharmaceutical companies do a lot of research and development, spend lots of money, and need a market for their products. Well, here's a great marketmandatory vaccinations without any long-term clinical studies to examine the risks," says Williams.
The dangers of monkey viruses from vaccines are getting a lot of attention in laboratories across the country. Michele Carbone, Ph.D., a molecular pathologist at Chicago's Loyola University Medical Center, has linked the monkey viruses found in polio vaccines to human cancer. Indeed, other researchers such as Harvard medical professor Ronald Desrosier, Ph.D., and John Martin, Ph.D., a professor of pathology at the University of Southern California, are warning the government that monkey viruses can be dangerous to humans and may cause everything from cancer to AIDS.
In his research, Carbone has found that SV-40, a monkey virus, is a cancer-causing agent, and that this virus contaminated OPVs given to Americans in the 1950s. To make matters worse, Italian researchers reporting in the medical journal
Cancer Research
suggest that SV-40, originally introduced to humans through the OPV, is now being spread from mother to child in the womb. Researchers suggest it may be responsible for the 30 percent increase in brain tumors in the United States over the past twenty years.
The sharp increase in childhood allergies is being examined as well. Harris Coulter, Ph.D., expert on the pertussis vaccine and coauthor of
DPT: A Shot in the Dark,
believes vaccines and allergies are clearly connected. The more you vaccinate your children, he says, the more you increase their allergic state. "Vaccines play the role of hypersensitizing the individual, generally speaking, so that he or she becomes more allergic to such common foods as
 
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milk or peanut butter or wheat, which are highly allergenic substances to large numbers of the population."
There is also a suspected link between vaccinations and crib death, or SIDS. In 1975, a law was passed in Japan to prevent vaccination of children under the age of two. Shortly after that, crib deaths and infantile convulsions disappeared from that country. In 1988, the medical journal
Pediatrics
reported that when parents in Japan were later given the option to vaccinate children under the age of two, rates of crib death quadrupled.
The smallpox vaccine also has been linked to the AIDS epidemic. This finding is based on World Health Organization statistics revealing that the greatest spread of HIV occurred in places with the most intensive vaccination programs. AIDS appeared in African countries that had been inoculated against smallpox, while neighboring countries that did not receive the vaccine remained unaffected. The same was true in South America. The smallpox vaccine is a bovine virus derived from the pus inside a cow's udder. Researchers theorize that the bovine virus can create a dormant AIDS virus, which can become activated at some point.
Playing Statistical Roulette
Proponents argue that some loss of life is acceptable in the wake of the benefits derived from vaccines. The International Association of Biological Standards sets the expected risk/benefit ratio that should allow vaccines to be used. According to the association, "The subject affected by an inoculation has, without doubt, made a special sacrifice in the interest of the general public."
In this statistical-roulette approach to health care, this is how the logic goes: It's OK if my two-year-old develops polio from the live polio vaccine and can never walk again. He has sacrificed his own well-being for that of the world at large.
As a mother, I find this logic particularly upsetting. I won't sacrifice my child's well-being for anyone. My maternal instincts tell me to protect her from danger at all costs. Fisher agrees: "I've had physicians tell me that I'm selfish because I won't subject my two younger, healthy children to vaccines. They say I'm putting the community at risk. However, they want to put my children at risk of brain damage and death from immunizations, and that's OK with them. It's not with me."
 
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Proponents also say that vaccines are responsible for the decline of polio and smallpox. Researchers know that infectious diseases were already in decline before vaccines were introduced. After World War II, the incidence of infectious disease started dropping on its own due to clean water, central heating, and a higher-quality food supply.
Indeed, there is some evidence that vaccines even increase death rates from the diseases they inoculate against. In the fifteen years following the introduction of the diphtheria vaccine in 1894, the number of diphtheria deaths in England and Wales rose 20 percent. Between 1895 and 1907, there were 63,249 cases of diphtheria in vaccinated individuals; 8,917 people died, a fatality rate of 14 percent. In the same time period, 11,716 cases were not treated with vaccines; only 703 died, a fatality rate of 6 percent.
In 1926, the American Medical Association started a drive to abolish diphtheria by 1930. Despite these efforts, states giving the largest number of diphtheria vaccinations in turn had the highest diphtheria death rates by 1930. For example, Michigan had one of the highest rates of inoculation and the highest rate of diphtheria deaths. In England from 1871 to 1880, during a period of compulsory smallpox vaccination, the death rate from smallpox leaped from 28 to 46 per 100,000.
Reactions to Vaccinations: The Hard Facts
Polio
Given at two, four, and six months of age with boosters between four and six years old, this vaccine is designed to protect against poliomyelitis. Since 1979, the only cases of polio reported in the United States have been caused by the live OPV.
In 1994, the Institute of Medicine found compelling scientific evidence that the live OPV can cause paralytic and nonparalytic polio that can end in death. The Centers for Disease Control estimated that the risk is one case of vaccine-associated polio per 520,000 first OPV doses administered to an individual, and one case per 12.3 million for subsequent doses. The Institute of Medicine also concluded that the OPV can lead to poliovirus infection and death in individuals who come in close contact with those who have

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