Unvaccinated children for those interested

[blisteringbarnacles]

Hi
I'm sorry everybody but doubletroublemaker was really me. I was just in an antsy mood at what I saw to be blind faith in government recommendations and changed my name to stir up debate, though apart from that I was posting in good faith. Do forgive me (or not --don't blame you) but I'm now about to post various bits of information that people expressed an interest in. I can't do a link due to mumsnet techno illiteracy but am copying and pasting some stuff which you may want to google or investigate further. Or not.

"In Chicago, Homefirst Medical Services treats thousands of never-vaccinated children whose parents received exemptions through Illinois' relatively permissive immunization policy. Homefirst's medical director, Dr. Mayer Eisenstein, told us he is not aware of any cases of autism in never-vaccinated children. The national rate is 1 in 175, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "We have a fairly large practice," Eisenstein says. "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. "We do have enough of a sample," Eisenstein said. "The numbers are too large to not see it. We would absolutely know. We're all family doctors. If I have a child with autism come in, there's no communication. It's frightening. You can't touch them. It's not something that anyone would miss."

Just a starter, now I'm going to look for more, particularly on allergies.

so when people talk about single vaccines is it beuase they dont want the mesles vaccines ( usually) but happy to have the rest.

Yurt1 why is it that you dont vaccinate against measles? is it just measles? - i am curious simply becuase you mentioned your mother.

"blind faith in government recommendations"??

Oh FFS, how ignorant do you credit people as being. And really do you seriosuly think that you and your anonymous posts are more reliable than all the science published about this - not only by goevrnemt scientists - but more so, so you really think that there is some government conspiracy to hurt the children in the societies they represent?

People like you spoutng new age pseudoscience really makes me sick. It kills people and you dare to I am more sick though is that people are so gullible to take the word of people like you with no credentials at all against experts who fight it out amonst themselves with all the evidence, some not even availbible to the public, and not selective pieces and aided by specialists who can handle the anounts of data and interpret the information therein.

After all this hoohar the MMR still stands because it is the best solution for the most people - that is how our soeciety is managed. for the common good. If you don't believe that then go visit Africa and see what vaccinations are doing there.

aw yurt , me too.
First in line with my little red book I was. I used to work in insurance, medical malpractice - I could not have been more mainstream. I probably would have been so vociferous 'on the other side' as it were ,had life not happened.
Well we live and learn

For the common good, Yurt.

The NHS would collapse if it had to consuder every individual difference. It does consider difference and tried to accomodate it. But the NHS is a fucking privledge. We seem to have forgotten that. It is adaptable but it isn;t a bottomless money pit and it is buckling unde the strain of out relenless demands fed by claptrap like this.

I am now removing this thread from my active convos before I become violent

It is difficult though because there are different issues here

The common good

Responsibility for your own dc's

Sometimes these may clash

monkey trousers,
do you think you could possibly contemplate that given that vaccine damage is an accepted and recognised condition you could moderate your aggresive attitude just a little.

'Common good' should include identifying and caring for those who have been damaged. It would cost next to nothing to identify children who are more at risk of vaccine damage, and considering the cost of ds1's care as an adult will be (at todays prices) 300 A DAY has the potential to save a whole lot of cash as well It would have cost 50 pence more to give ds1 thimerosal free vaccinations.

Agree totally cam.

I had ds1 vaccinated mainly because I thought it was for his own good, partly because I thought it was for the common good. Ds2 and ds3 I think are less likely to benefit themselves, and more likely to be damaged than the average Joe Public child. I'm not happy to end up with another severely autistic child 'for the common good'. Not a good enough reason.

The NHS might be a privilege but it also refuses to provide basic services such as SALT to severely autistic children (this is policy now by the way), and having spent thousands on therapies that should be publically availabe forgive me if I fail to see the wondrous body for what it is.

Ultimately I think it should be about providing appropriate information on both sides of the debate, which would enable parents to make informed choices without having to resort to looking up potentially inaccurate articles on the internet.

I remember when ds became due for his mmr I spent a lot of time wondering whether I was doing the right thing, but ultimately I believed that the benefits outweighed the risks, and he was vaccinated without me really giving it much thought. I can also remember thinking at friends who had chosen to give their children single vaccines, as really I couldn?t see the point. And I remember joining mn and wading into a vaccination debate and proclaiming that I thought parents who chose not to vaccinate their children were irresponsible and that they were not only putting their children, but other children at risk, and I think it was dinosaur that took me to task on it. And then I read more threads about vaccination, actually read them, and the research that some of them linked to, and the personal experiences that some people had had with vaccination and their children, and I came to the realization that it really isn?t as black and white as the arguments on both sides would have us believe.

But it?s taken hearing from people with actual stories to make me see that it?s not as simple as choosing to/not choosing to vaccinate, and that is wrong. That information shouldn?t be scattered all over the forums on a parenting website, that information should be made available to each and every parent when they are faced with the letter saying that their children are due for their vaccinations. Even Andrew Wakefield said that most children would be fine with mmr, but there are those that may not, and the parents of those that may not be fine should be aware of the indicators in order that they can make informed decisions, and by informed I mean informed by the professionals, not informed by google. And once those parents have made their informed choice, they should then be offered the appropriate course of action that is best for their child.

And I maintain my point in my previous post that I think the article linked to in the op is neither helpful nor informative, and that the doctor in question seems to have very limited understanding of autism so doesn?t really seem fit to comment.

Yes- it's having an open discussion about vaccination that seems strrangely threatening. Which is a shame. The ridiculous MMR lion prowling next to a pushchair campaign cost 3 million pounds- that would have been enough to develop some sort of screening tool to individualise the vacccination programme.

I have to admit though I have found the medical profession (especially at senior level) remarkably supportive about our decision to be very very careful with ds2 and ds3. Especially when I mention that ds3 has the same gut problem as ds1. It's shame that that conversation has to be parent initiated though and a little surreal. It's almost as if everyone tiptoes around the conversation but when its actually had you find that the medics views are patient driven rather than policy driven as well. Which is encouraging.

MT, please please stop swearing. you are swearing at mothers that have vaccine damaged children, others who have done painstaking research for whatever reason and still others who take a moderate but questioning view.

and at one mother, me, with an enormous amount of eczema and life threatening asthma on one side, and a father polio damaged on the other. my ds is unvaccinated and i certainly did not take that decision lightly. my dh's father was a consultant physician and dh is very traditional wrt western medicine. he is absolutely convinced that ds should not be vaccinated. We did an enormous amount of reading. it is there for you to do should you so wish. Vaccines work to some extent and having your child immunised is one way of protecting your child's health. However, as I've said, I believe there are consequences to vaccinated children's health just as there are for unvaccinated children (they run the risk of catching the diseases they have not been vaccinated against). Measles was absolutely not perceived as the terrible killer it is portrayed as now. I remember having it, EVERYONE had it. Absolutely, in some, very rare, cases (usually with other factors involved) there are complications. However, Ruty is right, the government is now gearing up to portray chicken pox as some awful scourge to be eradicated by vaccines, which is patently isn't.

you can denigrate me as pseudoscientifically raping the herd immunised population by my decision if you wish, but the assertion is neither useful nor true.

I do think the argument 'for the common good' is a bit disingenuous. I mean there is a point to it, certainly, but I do think most people vaccinate primarily to protect their own children. And if your own child had an existing condition that made vaccinating more risky, I believe most people would weigh up the decision on what was best for the individual child, not for the 'common good' It may be a factor, certainly, but I do not think it is the primary factor, though it may make one feel good to claim it is.

The problem is though the huge scare caused by the Wakefield paper did nothing to help children who might be at risk, and has almost certainly caused harm if only in terms of worrying parents and consuming a huge amount of time of parents, clinicians and researchers that could have been spent more profitably on something else quite apart from those outbreaks of measles, mumps and rubella with a direct link to the dropping rate of MMR vaccinations.

The Wakefield paper is still valid. The worry to the parents would not have occurred had m m and r been offered singly. I'm not sure that there have been huge outbreaks of measles mums and rubella. There was an outbreak of mumps in university students due to immunity wearing off - mumps vaccine induced immunity is not that great (or them having recieived MR rather than MMR after the urabe mess up- when the mumps component of MMR caused viral meningitis - MMR was witrhdrawn for a while after that).

havent read the entire thread but had to comment on this earlier posting:

'I wonder how many adults that had measles or whooping cough, would then refuse the vaccinations???? I bet none would '

i had measles and whooping cough...and mumps.i went along with the vaccinations for my first 2 children without giving it a second thought,but then i was naive and trusted the advice of doctors and HV's back then.i wasnt sure about ds2 getting the MMR but i gave in to pressure in the end.he had constant ear infections and got rotavirus 3 times in the 6 months that followed,now he has hearing problems.

dd2 isnt having the MMR,and sofar 10 month old dd3 has had no jabs atall.i would have let her have the baby jabs if i'd found any impartial evidence that they were ok(since they have added 2 new ones)but i couldnt.only evidence that childhood infection rayes were falling before the introduction of the vaccination programme,plus many forums dedicated to those who had lost children to these vaccinations.

i dont think its a conspiracy thing,i just know that the pharmaseutical industry dont give a rats arse about the health of the nation,and i wouldnt trust their so-called clinical trials either.

divastrop

It's the conclusions to the paper and the publicity surrounding it that were/are the issue. There is no evidence that single jabs are in any way safer, but they are more expensive and likely to have lower take up. This is the aspect of his paper that has been contraversial, and where the other contributors have withdrawn support. If the paper had been published in an immunology journal without all the shouting I wonder if a more constructive approach would have been taken.

The conclusion in the paper was that there was no causal evidence to link the MMR with autism. There is nothing wrong with the conclusions of the paper. At the recent GMC hearings Richard Horton (editor of the Lancet at the time- no fan of Wakefields) has said that the paper was an excellent example of a case series and the Science still stands.

It wouldn't have been published in an immunology journal as it was not an immunology paper. It might have been published in a Gastroenterology journal, but not an immunology one.

Divastrop- I had measles, my friend (with unvaccinated children) had whooping cough, ds2 had whooping cough we think (although not clinically confirmed), my mum had a very bad case of measles. Which just goes to show it isn't balck and white I guess. I re-read the JABS forum last night after reading your post

this is just a question , did anyone who didnt have their child vaccinated ,also refuse the polio and tetnus ?

ds2 and ds3 have had nothing. I would like them to have tetanus, but it only comes as the 5 in 1 and I don't want them having that. I certainly don't want ds3 having pertussis- he's had one seizure and pertussis is one of the biggest seizure risks vaccination wise (which is why when the US ran its vaccine damage compensation scheme drugs manufacturers had to pay considerably more into the pot for DTP than DT).

If they don't bring out a paediatirc single or DT tetanus then they may have to wait until 10. Although I am planning to make an appointment with Richard Halvorsen as he seems to know what he's talking about & it would be good to talk through the options & risks/benefits with him.

I have seen (professionally) children die from childhood diseases and damaged from secondary effects, such as menigitis and profound brain damage - palsy, deafness and blindness. I have also nursed adults in ICU with mumps and measles.

Becuase of this I had my children vaccinated.

Why were the adults getting mumps and measles though? I would be interested in whether, in absolute numbers, in countries where measles has been endemic for hundreds of years whether measles/mumps cases in adults are increasing. That is one danger with vaccinating against childhood illnesses- you raise the age at which people contract it. Having looked at the figures in the last mumps outbreak in 200 there were 56000 cases of mumps (ish) 46000 of those were in the 15+ age group. It's hard to work out what that means because the 15 year olds in the cohort had MMR, but anyone older than 18ish probably didn't. However if you look at 1989 notifications of mumps (the year when MMR was introduced with only 7% of children receiving it) there were only 2512 cases of mumps in the adult age group (with 16000 catching it between the ages of 1 and 9). That does suggest that vaccinating against mumps is pushing the age at which you catch it up- which is undesirable to say the least (especially because in a child mumps is a mild illness- it's not measles).

In ds1's school there are children who have been left disabled following meningitis which again just highlights how grey it all is for people in our sort of position.

mumps outbreak on 2005 that should read

Two adult cases that I remember well are a male teacher who caught mumps from an unvaccinated pupil (traced by ph) and a young father.

I remember the teacher well as he was very very ill and left sterile and incapacitated generally. He was in ICU for weeks.

I have no idea of epidemiology with all this - but the severity of the illnesses and secondary effects I saw left me in no doubt that I wanted to protect my children against these diseases.

Incidentally, my dd had measles (defaulted on initial vaccine twice as she was unwell on both occasions). The a and e I took her to, here in France -we were on holiday, had a doctor there who had never seen a case of measles before...

But that's what I mean. Mumps in adults is dangerous. Catching natural mumps as a kid usually gives you lifelong immunity - it appears that vaccinating doesn't. In the States they introduced a booster for that reason- but they haven't done that in the UK. Measles is a harder one to weigh up as it can be nasty in children as well & there is a higher risk of complications than mumps, but in a third of cases mumps in children is so mild the child doesn't even know they have it. If vaccinating children actually increases the number of adult cases (which is might- should be monitered anyway) then it might not be such a great idea to vaccinate.

When they introduced mumps vaccination they over-estimated its effectiveness which is part of the problem. Had they known its actual effectiveness perhaps it wouldn't have been introduced because of the danger of mumps in adults.

I really don't understand the logic of vaccinating against mumps (I can see the logic for all the other vaccinations even if we've chosen to not give them).