I understand the unvaccinated children tend to cluster because they live in an area where there are many ‘like-minded’ people.
Undervaccinated children seem to cluster as well, usually because they are of a lower socioeconomic status and/or don’t have acess to healthcare services.
Herd immunity does not help these kids because their herd is not well immunized.
Also, I don’t find the ‘natural immunity’ (aquired after contracting the disease) touted by anti-vaxxers to be all that attractive since many of these diseases cause blindness, deafness, mental retardation, etc.
Of the 5 Minnesota Hib cases, two were anti-vaxers, one was waiting until the child turned 5 to vaccinate, one was fully vaccinated but had an immune deficiency, and the last case was a 5 month old who had not completed the Hib series of vaccination.
The child who died belonged to one of the antivaxers.
All I saw was that there are more diseases being vaxed against, not the number of actual shots young children get. I read somewhere that a child will have had 50 shots by the time they start school - is this not true?
Actually, what I was talking about was the research that shows that frequent (and apparently unnecessary) vaccinations compromise the immune system in dogs, particularly if multi-disease shots are used. Now I know that dogs are not children, but since both are mammals it makes me wonder.
So children no longer get vaccinated for multiple diseases all in one shot?
I grew up poor, so the only vaccinations I got were the ones that were given out at the school, and it was only three times - one multi shot, one polio sugar cube and one small pox vaccination. I don’t know if anything was required back then or not! I didn’t get the tetnus shot until I was 10-11 when I cut myself on something rusty.
Actually, I was referring to what all these shots appear to be doing to children’s immune systems. All these kids who are not only allergic, but deathly allergic to thing like peanuts - this was completely unheard of when I was young. And worries about children dying from diarrhea and mumps? Well raised children?
And a side thing - I never even heard of meningitis until about 10 years ago - was this something that kids didn’t used to get, or was it regional in the past? (I grew up in the PNW).
Anyway, all of that and worries about immune systems is why it would scare me to death to have a kid these days
Yes, kids die from mumps - my mother had a cousin that died from mumps - yes, well raised children - when infections take hold they don’t really care if your house was tidy - although a well fed kid might fight off the infection better (or they may not - see cytokine storms.) A kid I went to high school with died of chicken pox. Meningitis kills people each year - there was an outbreak in my college dorms (in 1984 or 5) and I have a friend who was hospitalized by it for three weeks.
Aside from death, AFAIK mumps is pretty painful, and there isn’t much you can do for it but let it run it’s course. It can also cause sterility.
There was a small meningitis outbreak at my college too (around 2000-2001, I think), and our school started offering the vaccine after that.
Chicken pox, which is mild (if quite unpleasant) for most people can cause painful shingles if you get the disease as an adult, or even if it resurfaces even after you’ve already had the disease. It can also cause birth defects if you get it while pregnant.
Death isn’t the only concern with most of these diseases.
The issue with these Hib cases is that they may just be the canary in the mine.
We’ve been in a shortage for Hib and accordingly we are all holding off on the booster dose so that there is enough for the primary series. The fear is that that may be increasing the general carriage rate. The first to get sick with that overall decrease in complete protection will be those unprotected but their illnesses may be a warning that everyone else is at increased risk as well.
And in the days before vaccines, most people didn’t die - just more people died. Or were disabled by the virus. It IS rare to die from chicken pox - more common, but still rare to die of measles or mumps.
Mumps isn’t Ebola. Measles not the Spanish Flu. But the whole “my grandmother had mumps and said it wasn’t a big deal” line of argument is sort of like “I grew up without car seats and I’m still alive.”
Here’s what Dr. Paul Offit, pediatrician and infectious disease/immunology expert has had to say about the “too many shots too soon” claim:
*"From the birth canal and beyond, infants are confronted by a host of different challenges to their immune system. Their intestines encounter foreign proteins in milk and formula. Their lungs encounter bacteria inhaled on the surface of dust in the air. And literally thousands of different bacteria immediately start to live on the skin, as well as on the lining of the nose, throat, and intestines. Here is how infants deal with this immediate confrontation to their immune system.
Babies have a tremendous capacity to respond to their environment from the minute they are born. The newborn has billions of immunologic cells that are capable of responding to millions of different microorganisms. By quickly making an immune response to bacteria that live on the surface of their intestines, babies keep those bacteria from invading their bloodstream and causing serious disease. Therefore, the combination of the three vaccines contained in MMR, or even the 10 vaccines given in the first 2 years of life, is literally a raindrop in the ocean of what infants successfully encounter in their environment every day."*
Adjuvants in vaccines are part of what make them successful in preventing disease by stimulating a healthy immune response. Antivaxers, having been unsucessful in casting the largely phased out preservative thimerosal as a bogeyman, have turned to minute amounts of aluminum used as adjuvant (as well as other phantom “toxins”) to blame for autism, allergies and whatever other horrific ills they like to blame on vaccines. There’s no credible science or clinical experience to support these claims.
I do not have children, so if my post is inaccurate, I hope someone will correct it. It’s my understanding that diarrhea in children can create a life-threatening situation fairly quickly, regardless of “well raised” status (I assume you mean well-fed?). From what I can gather, the electrolyte imbalances and other changes in the body due to uncontrolled diarrhea are more concerning due to the differences in size between children and adults.
I’m not a human doctor, so I defer that to someone else.
Well, I do have to thank you for making me do some Pubmed research. And I did find two recent articles talking about compromise in the immune system. The conclusions of both, though, was that the effect was transient and that the vaccines should still be administered to healthy animals. Furthermore, one of the studies said that while it seems that polyvalent vaccines are immunosuppressed, there is actually a shifting in upregulation of humoral-mediated immunity compared to cellular-mediated immunity. Eh… Basically one branch of the immune system appears suppressed, but the immune status of the animal is still OK, as the decline in that branch is counteracted by an increase in activity in other area. If they’re only measuring a specific part of the immune system (the part declining), they’ll miss the part that is being upregulated.
Immune system development in the dog and cat. Day MJ. J Comp Pathol. 2007 Jul;137 Suppl 1:S10-5. Epub 2007 Jun 8. Review.
Immune modulation following immunization with polyvalent vaccines in dogs. Strasser A, May B, Teltscher A, Wistrela E, Niedermüller H. Vet Immunol Immunopathol. 2003 Aug 15;94(3-4):113-21.
And many other animals are mammals too, like humans, doesn’t mean that we get extensive granulation tissue like horses or that dogs will be severely affected by vitamin C deficiency.
Not a human doctor, again, so I defer. But I can’t remember a childhood vaccine, and looking at the CDC schedule, I can’t find a vaccine that has 5-9 components in it, like many vaccines in animals have.
I did a whole bunch of research and did a long, comprehensive post on the seriousness of commonly vaccinated childhood diseases about a year ago if anyone wants to search that up. It was chilling to find out about all of that - there’s a reason that we developed vaccinations for these diseases.
To answer curlcoat’s question (sort of), children (and some adults) get a combination of vaccines: MMR (Measles-Mumps-Rubella [German Measles]) and DPT (Diphtheria-Pertussis-Tetanus) shots. So, yes, children are getting immunized against three diseases in one go. As I recall, the MMR shot has to be given in two doses over the course of two weeks (I had to be re-immunized as an adult to attend classes at my local University, since my vaccination records have vanished into the mists of time).
I believe there are other immunizations given, but I’m damned if I can remember what any of them are.
I’m not sure, but my kids didn’t get that many. Like you, I didn’t get many as a kid, because there weren’t many to give, but just before I went to Africa, in 1961, I got a million vaccinations for the lovely set of diseases I would be exposed to there. I was out of school more than I was in, but I managed not to catch anything, so it was worth it. Thus, I’m sensitive to the number of vaccinations you can get.
I’m not sure it was common practice to give tetanus shots before they were needed, since you’d need a booster anyway. I don’t remember getting one except in connection to getting a cut. I’m not sure the yunguns realize that we didn’t get MMR shots because they hadn’t been invented yet, not due to lack of caring parents.
My daughter was on the verge of hospitalization once from diarrhea, and it hadn’t gone on too long. It is possible for little kids to get dehydrated very quickly. I never had mumps as a kid, but I had everything else. I think I eventually got one. In my recollection, things like the measles are far more serious for adults than for kids. I don’t know if your parents did it, but when I was a kid parents often exposed their kids to stuff like this deliberately to get it over with. One of these common diseases (measles?) is very dangerous when you are pregnant, and my wife, who had never had it, got an immunization right after the birth of our first kid to be safe for our second - and to make sure she didn’t get it from unimmunized kids she’d be exposed to.
This seems to go back to concerns about what all these vaccinations are doing to immune systems. When I was young, 35-40 years ago, we barely got sick from chicken pox, much less die of it!
Not if the car seats (the cure) is more harmful than the disease. That is the theory I’m exploring since it has been proven in dogs that multiple vaccinations and boosters are harmful to them.
No, not the adjuvants, the vaccine itself. Unless things have changed and/or human vaccines work differently than dog ones, the way they work is to “trick” the immune system into thinking that the child/dog had the disease and he now has the antibodies to keep from getting the actual disease in the future. These assaults on the developing immune system have been shown to cause immune system problems later on in dogs - it may be that because humans are born more fully “cooked” than dogs, their immune systems can handle all these vaccinations. OTOH, there is all of these immune related problems going on in children these days. (And, it doesn’t help that so many children are raised in what are essentially bubbles these days, what with all of the “germ fighting” products out there.)
Well fed, living in clean surroundings, not exposed to third world diseases, all of that. Yes, uncontrolled diarrhea is more serious in a very young baby/puppy, but what I don’t get is how the well fed, living in clean surroundings, not exposed to third world diseases etc baby would end up getting life threatening diarrhea - pups living like that don’t. And I don’t think I’ve ever known anyone whose baby did either. Is this one of those “just in case a one in a million thing happens” sort of thing?
Give vaccines yes, give annual multi-disease boosters, no. As here. Your cites appear to be talking about the immediate results from being vaccinated once, rather than long term affects of multiple, close together vaccinations. And the second cite was from a study of 33 dogs of the same breed (and most likely the same family). Not too compelling…
Yes. However, children are showing the same symptoms that dogs were that lead to studies on the long term affects frequent and unnecessary vaccination.
As I say, I don’t have and never will have any children, so it’s not like I’m going to end up sending evil unvaccinated children to school. But if I were a mother I’d be exploring the middle ground of not giving them everything possible that is out there, and doing it a bit slower.
You are about the same age I am…funny how different our experiences with diseases - yes, death from chicken pox has always been rare, but its not unknown and never has been.
I think this is a totally different topic. However,
It now seems that many children thought to be allergic to peanuts, actually may not be. Full article here
It also appears that doctor’s policies may actually have lead to an increase in true peanut allergies by recommending that children not be exposed to peanuts before the age of three. A recent British study found that early exposure actually decreased the risk of developing an allergy. (more info in the above linked article).
Finally, there is a hypothesis that the sterile environment in which we raise our children actually makes more susceptible to allergies and auto-immune diseases. Article here.
