This is off topic and probably not even allowed in the Pit. But thank you for this cite. I have long thought that this might be true but had no evidence other than anecdotal.
You have here nailed the crux of a mindset that goes from vaccines to George Will’s lying about “global cooling”. There remains in this world a mistrust and misunderstanding of science among large portions of the population. “Science has been wrong before …” as you say, so my Creation story must be true, or my crazy ass blaming vaccines for everything, or no need to do anything about carbon emissions, or … whatever. Scientists are wrong all the time so we can ignore them. Heck distrust them. Frankenstein’s Monster. The Andomeda Strain. This is what science does.
Not quite sure how to combat that.
Speaking of people who go to great lengths to assure us they’re not antivaccinationists (but whose actions reveal otherwise), here’s a timely piece about celebrity pediatrician Jay Gordon (who also uses the “science has been wrong before” dodge). Dr. Jay is most unhappy about the recent Autism Omnibus findings in three test cases, that vaccines do not cause autism.
BTW, thanks again to DSeid, LavenderBlue and others here for contributing much good information and valuable links debunking antivax claims.
I wish that study had received as much publicity as anything ever falsely put up by Andrew Wakefield.
Sigh.
On some level I can sympathize with the terror people feel on this issue. As a parent I have found many aspects of parenting frightening. Sometimes I think I spend half my scared that I’m doing something wrong and my beloved child will grow up and turn into a brat and perhaps even a serial killer.
First you worry about what you’re eating during pregnancy. Then you worry about epidurals. Then you worry about breastfeeding and then about solids and potty training and then about reaching milestones.
You think it’s going to get easier and (as nearly as I can tell) it doesn’t. Formula feeding has quantifiable potential risks. But what if you’re not reading enough to your child? How much television should you let your child watch? When do they get to sleepover at someone’s house? How do you deal with bullying on the bus? What if your child isn’t reading or doing math at grade level?
All of this just gets more and more complicated and even scarier.
So I get furious at the anti-vax movement.
Why? Because vaccines really are one of the very, very, very few easy parenting decisions.
This is all uncomplicated. If your child is at greater risk from a vaccine reaction then you shouldn’t vaccinate. If your child isn’t (and most babies aren’t) you should.
Measles, mumps, rubella, tetanus, polio, pertussis, chicken pox, HiB, Hep B aren’t made up bogeymen marketers dreamed up. They exist and they can be prevented or lessened if you catch them via vaccines. To argue otherwise simply isn’t true.
Parenting has been a wonderful adventure so far. My daughter delights me every single day with her kindness and her sense of wonder and her sweetness. She turned my very favorite male person in the entire world into a daddy I am proud to be around.
But oh dear god has it been hard as hell sometimes!
Making it even harder . . . as the anti-vax contingent does? Utterly unforgivable.
I think you touched on this in the GD thread on this subject…it’s all about paranoia. It’s not just a fear of science, it’s a fear of the establishment…the government, Big Pharma, Big Oil, etc. etc. It’s all a conspiracy against the regular people.
To be fair Lavender we pediatricians don’t make it much easier!
Kids are getting fat from not enough exercise better get them outside running around more.
But be careful too much sun causes skin cancer. Better only go out in the morning and late afternoon when the sun is less intense.
Ah, but that’s when the mosquitoes are out and you know about West Nile virus! Better stay inside.
But kids are getting fat from not enough exercise … rinse repeat!
Is it no wonder that so many parents tear their hair out?
Seriously, we pediatricians, as a group, are not doing a great job helping put risks into perspective. And since most of the public has had the personal experience with these diseases of curlcoat, that is not seeing the horrible effects that most of the vaccine preventable diseases not too infrequently used to cause, and yet are aware of things like autism and allergies, it can seem to make sense that the possibility that the scientists are wrong (and aren’t they wrong all the time? George Will just said how they all used to say we should be afraid of global cooling!) is bigger than the benefit of preventing a disease they’ve never personally seen.
Nothing to do with vaccinations. Not every disease kids get can be prevented.
My misery from getting the disease, even intentionally. was far greater than that of my kids from getting a shot, and the risks were smaller also. If vaccines had existed for these diseases I assure you all the kids would have gotten them. I think the reason for this mass exposure was to have kids get the diseases when young, and to more or less allow the illness to be scheduled.
I don’t know if they were aware back then of the dangers to pregnant mothers, but I’m pretty sure they were aware that it is worse to get as an adult.
Dseid,
The sort of stuff you’re writing about is almost the sort that parents almost expect will be difficult. You want your child to get exercise. But you also want to keep her safe.
So you can kind of find a very comfortable middle ground in all of that.
IMO the media has been very much at fault for giving the anti-vaxxers a platform and a place at the table.
As someone pointed out many media outlets tend towards the sensational and do not always do their homework. So you get reporters who will bring on Jenny McCarthy (who actually had a book about vaccines published by a mainstream publisher!) or Imus’s wife as if they had credibility on this subject. Even Jon Stewart had Robert Kennedy Jr. on to talk about vaccines if he were anything but wrong about it.
I would love to see a public health campaign by officials on this subject. In light of the recent measles epidemic I think we sorely need one.
Then again some of our officials are sadly just as ill informed as many members of the media on this subject. New York’s newest senator (and twenty two of her fellow legislators) being among them.
Not to mention Tuskeegee
Going strictly on memory, I thought it was talking about allergens, but I suppose if bacteria is being kept out, so would allergens.
What about the mother’s T cells (those are the ones that respond to allergens, right?) - if the mother is sensitized to something, would they be transferred to the baby?
Except at some point, many children these days start having trouble with their immune systems and the question is - why?
Do you have a cite? This is what I was asking way back when - have there been any studies as there have been in pets, that explored the theory that multiple vaccinations at one time and/or close together and/or boosting the same thing repeatedly cause immune problems later in life? Heck, have there been any studies at all trying to figure out why there are so many children with serious allergies, asthma and other immune issues?
I read the whole thing. It would help if you would reference the part you think I am not understanding.
OK, assuming the mother is responsible enough to make all the extra visits, has it actually been proven that not giving a little baby a hepatitis shot in a case when it is highly unlikely to be exposed is really a problem? How likely is it that a 2 month old is going to be exposed to diphtheria or tetnus? Or polio? Why do babies need three hepatitis shots? Or four HIB shots?
The question, my original question, is has anyone actually studied this? When it was studied in pets, it was discovered that no one had checked out the vaccine companies claims that boosters needed to be given every year, and when it was checked they found that for the most part, boosters don’t ever need to be given. Cites have been given which the posters thought answered my question, but it appears to me that all that has been studied is either immediate reactions, or whether it is better to be vaccinated or get the disease.
Uh, OK? I don’t believe I’ve ever said that vaccines cause less antigens than actually getting the disease, but the point is you had all of those diseases over a period of a few years, not a few weeks or months. In between your immune system had time to recover. There is also the possibility that the natural antigens is less rough on the immune system than the tinkered with ones in the vaccines, no matter how much more you get with the disease. Don’t know - has that been looked at?
Yup, so much so that I never questioned it, did I?
You think they all are?
Sigh. And yet you go on to agree with me.
I wouldn’t know about any antivax false mantras. All of my questions come from research done on pet vaccines.
No, not the cells… some of the antibodies that the mom produce can be transferred to the baby (in humans, IIRC not in dogs). That exchange also happens during breastfeeding, but those antibodies are not long lasting and taper out. And since they didn’t come from the organism, once they’re gone there is no cell to produce them anymore.
Which is, at least in dogs, about the time that vaccines start. If vaccines are administered while maternal antibodies are still strong, the pup (kitten, calf, foal, etc.) will not mounts its own response, instead the mom’s defenses will deal with it. Basically the vaccine would have no effect and the pup would not be effectively immunized.
If the baby starts out in life with trouble in its immune system, it is hard to blame vaccines the baby has not been getting, right?
It was discovered that receiving the same booster every year was unnecessary. It is not the same to say that there was no effect from originally inoculating the animals against said disease. You keep talking about boosters in animals, when in humans the talk is not boosters, is first time inoculation, which is not the same.
Again, no one is claiming that humans have to go through the childhood vaccine protocol every other year (or every 5 years). In fact, the initial boosters in humans are more spaced out than those in animals (babies are not getting new vaccines or boosters every 2-4 weeks like animals do).
And again, this also has to do with vaccine effectiveness. Like I said earlier, some of those combo vaccines are long lasting, but some components appear to last less than others (lepto). IIRC, bacterins, which are vaccines against bacteria, are usually less effective than other vaccines. The same is seen in other animals that receive bacterins and have to be vaccinated every year to protect them against those diseases.
Genetics is probably a huge part of it:
By the way the epipen wasn’t invented until 1973 - and has allowed a lot of allergy sufferers to survive to adulthood. And reproduce.
A major theme in the speculations about why there are significantly more allergies and autoimmune diseases today has to do with the exact opposite of the anti-vax musings about too much exposure too soon; it seems that we may have too little exposure and too late.
One of the two variations on the theme is the “hygiene hypothesis.” Living in a world with Tb, small pox, and other occasionally deadly diseases may indeed have had some benefits: if you survived that exposure to the huge numbers of antigens those germs exposed you to (as opposed to the very few that newer immunizations expose one to) your immune system was much more agile from the experience and less likely to overreact to more subtle exposures later in life. Chronic infection with parasitic worms also has its advantages if the nutritional demands of the worms didn’t kill you: the worms produce anti-inflamatory substances that suppress immune responses making asthma and auto-immune disorders less common. Kill the worms and allergies increase.
Early exposure to huge antigen loads from potentially deadly infections may not be the only protective early large exposure to antigens. In an example of science possibly getting it wrong, the advise to intentionally delay exposure to highly allergic substances may not protect but may instead result in small unavoidable exposures that make allergies all the more likely. Exposure to massive amounts of allergens on a farm is associated with fewer allergies. Early cat exposure is protective from developing later cat allergies. And the most notable is that it might be that early exposure to highly allergic foods, like peanuts, is protective rather than risky. This was first speculated after the observation that there are few cases of serious peanut allergy in Israel where kids are commonly started on a snack made from ground peanuts at 6 months old while Jews in England of similar genetic background, delaying peanut exposure until at least 15 months old, have 10 times as many serious peanut allergies. Prospective studies are ongoing.
Of course much else has changed in Western society over the past several decades: chemical exposures; the rise of the internet; less sunlight exposure; and on and on and on. The “too little too late” speculation has some data behind it and may be true and yes, it is true that successful immunization programs have been part of reducing the exposure to serious illnesses and their huge antigen loads so may be therefore partially “to blame” ( a more than fair bargain) … but I wonder - how many of those concerned about vaccines are avoiding all of those other factors that have changed over the past several decades which have not been as tested as vaccines have?
I vaccinate my kids, but I keep a dirty house to compensate… 
I keep telling my wife that it’s a good thing that I’m a slob, but does she listen?
BTW, in case you think my comment about less sunlight exposure is just a throw-away - it is not: maternal prenatal Vitamin D levels may be protective against later allergies in the child. And the comment about the internet is biologically plausible as well - some posit an association between asthma and obesity and with sedentary behaviors. Not saying that any really does play a role but they are plausible, have not been disproven, and have changed over the last few decades yet do not evoke the same hysteria.
Sure (pdf). DSeid produced several others.
Regards,
Shodan