To wonder why on earth you would not vaccinate your DCs?

[olimpia]

I hear from another thread that some people choose not to vaccinate their DCs at all and I'm genuinely interested to hear why because I can't think of a single reason not to. I can perhaps understand opting out of the MMR if someone believes the bad press (not that I do) but all the other vaccinations? Why, oh why?
(not a troll! Just relatively new to MN)

saintly obviously I wasn't referring to you! I'm sure I've said this to you on this thread before. I was referring to those who do make these statements.

Ok Elaine, still struggling to find a full version here but I did find this about that specific paper.

"one should applaud the publication of the work by Préziosi et al. (5) on the epidemiology of whooping cough in a West African community before and after introduction of a widespread vaccination program. Yet one must keep in mind that the study covers only a small fraction of the Senegalese population and suffers from some methodological limitations such as the use of variable and not very specific case definitions and differences in follow-up over the study period, the lack of laboratory confirmation, and the fact that this is essentially presented as an ecologic study."

Still looking though! May not be able to come back too soon because I've got things I need to finish up tonight. I think I've neglected RL long enough! :)

I'm not sure what your point is Bumbley. The same people said "The authors should be praised for making a useful contribution" so they obviously didn't think the limitations negated the evidence. Are you suggesting that they are wrong or perhaps corrupt?

And I notice you left out how they started their commentary

"Pertussis remains one of the major causes of childhood morbidity and mortality at the global level. Widespread immunization coverage with diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis (DTP) vaccines is the cornerstone of prevention."

Selective quoting!

Well Elaine dino put forward the counter argument to vaccinating against chickenpox upthread. So you do act in the interests of your own child?

^wrt social responsibility, there is a very interesting thread in vaccinations, where posters are discussing the fact that giving the chicken pox vaccine is not the best thing for the population overall (less wild disease circulating, so less natural immunity boosts for those who have had it), but saying 'but my child/ren are such a small sample size that it isn't likely to affect anyone overall, so I'll go ahead and do what is best for my child, rather than best for the population as a whole'

funnily enough (since they are going ahead with a vaccine, rather than refusing one, albeit for purely selfish reasons), there is not a single criticism of this approach... yet turn the argument on its head, with posters saying the risk to their child is too great, so they will (selfishly, if you want to see it that way) not vaccinate, and suddenly there is a whole flood of posters criticising.^

Bollards - the bits between should be italics obviously - a quote from dino

I'm bowing out because this thread is going nowhere. I have my views and everyone else has theirs. I will leave it at that and I'm going to get a very early night of zzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Elaine I couldn't care less what other people do - it's up to them whether they vaccinate or not. In fact the vast majority of people we socialise with as a family have at least one unvaccinated child (its not easy to socialise with NT families when you have a child with severe LD's - so we tend to see families who have been once bitten, or who have a slightly alternative view of life and can therefore cope with ds1). So I don't go out of my way to only surround my children with vaccinated children.

You might not care less but it will still impact nonetheless on your child's likelihood of catching a disease which I thought you cared quite passionately about.

Unfortunately, if one of your unvaccinated children catches a disease in the community and brings it home, your other unvaccinated child, as a secondary case, is at even higher risk of complications. it's quite a risk to take.

Well it's a far higher risk for saintlys other children to be vaccinated wouldn't you think?

I don't know. I don't know her case at all.

But I do know that the vast majority of children CAN be vaccinated and SHOULD be vaccinated, primarily for themselves, but with the added benefit that this provides protection for the very small minority who can't.

I don't know where Saintly's children sit, I'm not her doctor, but if they are in the small minority who can't, then she should care very much whether other children are vaccinated or not especially since it's not vaccinations per se which seem to be the problem.

I don't want to put words into saintly's mouth, nor should I
However, it would seem to me that it is not a tiny proportion of children adversely affected by vaccination
The statistics aren't gathered, and diagnosis of conditions like ASD aren't happening until much later post vaccinattion which won't help
Isn't it reasonable to expect more research and data gathering of children pre disposed to vaccine damage?

There's plenty of research. The reason it's so difficult is because the numbers are so tiny. It's plausible that there could be some markers for the very very small number of children who may be affected by vaccines but it's very difficult to find one which is specific enough that it doesn't include a whole swathe who are perfectly fine to be vaccinated - because the number of affected children is so small.

There is no association between vaccines and ASD. We know that.

Surely, the reason the numbers are so tiny is obvious? The research isn't there. GP's don't pass on details of children having adverse affects to vaccines to some unseen research organisation. There isn't one. The government aren't collecting that data as far as I know ? Would love to be proved wrong if you know that is happening.
If you are happy to believe there is no link between vaccines and ASD, then good luck with that

It's not a belief system. It's what the evidence says. I think the difference is in how we weight evidence.

And there is a system for recording side effects to ALL medicines. Vaccines are no different.

Well they're not going to spread whooping cough from child to child as one has had it. And they're not going to spread rubella from child to child as one has had it. And they've all had chickenpox (several years apart) so there's not going to be any passing of that going on. Which leaves measles, and if either ds2 or ds3 had symptoms of measles they would, of course be quarantined within the house. (And read above for familiarity with prodromal symptoms). Which incidentally is more than happened with me, as I was sent to play with my friend who had whooping cough when I was recovering from measles.

And anyway risk of secondary case or not, it still doesn't make any difference to their specific risks from the vaccination. That hasn't gone away. At puberty the risk changes again and we may decide to vaccinate ds2 (not so sure about ds3) - will have a chat to him about it.

I'm afraid it's not my place to care whether other children have been vaccinated. It's not my business. The vast majority of my friends have damaged children. Whether they have been damaged by birth, disease, vaccination or genetics - they are in some way damaged. Beautiful, fantastic, wonderful kids; but damaged. One thing we all agree on is that there are many routes to severe disability and we understand that we all make decisions based on what happened to our families. And we don't judge each other. As it happens, a lot seem to have unvaccinated children as well and I fully understand why.

And it's agreed that vaccination damage is under recorded.

A friend's child ended up in HDU post vaccination. She asked for it to be recorded as a potential adverse reaction. Her request was refused.

I'm a big believer in evidence too. And you are quite right, it is how we weight evidence and that has to be, to some extent based on experience, knowledge and what we ourselves research.
I don't believe in accepting what the government or WHO happens to tell me, I know that their findings are based on extensive research, I also know that their I interests are biased.
I don't believe that responses to vaccines are recorded, I think that the system tends to record adverse affects separately.
GP's are loathe to record illnesses post vaccine, as vaccine related, especially adverse reactions.

Elaine - you do understand that autism isn't one thing don't you?

No one has suggested there is an association between 'autism' (all of it) and MMR. Although it seems to be that never-suggested association that has been repeatedly 'disproved'. (Well durr).

And it would be possible to identify the subgroup. Clinically they're distinct. One paper claimed to try and do this. Unfortunately they used the wrong set of symptoms, so identified a non-existent subgroup which was (again) a bit pointless.

mince - you can actually report adverse reactions yourself now. Although this is new and it seems to be kept very quiet (I seem to be the only person who know about this )

You can do it here:
yellowcard.mhra.gov.uk/

That's a great link. Should be more widely known. Perhaps mumsnet would like to put that more predominantly on the site, given the vast numbers of members?

Good idea. I have posted it on here repeatedly. No-one ever seems to know about it. I even had to tell a family member who is a health care professional as she thought adverse reactions still had to be reported via doctors.

My GP refused to record DS2s reaction to a jab

And my niece had a seizure in the GPs surgery and they also refused to list it as a reaction. They insisted it was co incidence even though she had no history of seizures at all.

When I got a massive swelling in my arm as a teenager, that wasn't recorded either. In fairness computers hadn't even invented and the quills probably hadn't been sharpened.

To be fair, the amount of changes in the software and differences in software packages betweens surgeries would probably struggles to put the data together even if it was gathered
[sharpens quill]