You’ll have to find a UK law expert on what is allowed in the UK. In the US, I know some people who have filed for exemptions - you can file an exemption based on religious or philosophical grounds.
For info generally supporting vaccinations (including studies on both sides), I like Medscape. You have to register, but it is free, and there is a lot of valuable content (including the Cochrane Medical Abstracts, which are ‘evidence-based medicine’ reviews of existing research).
I also tend to check the CDC website: Here’s their link on [ulr=“http://www.cdc.gov/nip/vacsafe/”]vaccine safety.
I’ve also scanned the vaccine safety website of Johns Hopkins University - good content there, too.
Here’s some more comprehensive commentary about separating the vaccines. I don’t know if the arguements all hold water, but they are at least all in one place.
For ‘con’ info, I’m not sure where to look - I tend to check the medscape site for both ‘pro’ and ‘con’ content, but they are a medical site, so could be biased.
On a personal note: I don’t know the facts behind it, but my pediatrician does not recommend splitting ‘mixed’ vaccines into their component parts. What he recommends is splitting the DOSE in two, and gives the half-doses two weeks apart. This is what he does for kids who have a reaction to the vaccine at an earlier vaccination (all subsequent doses are divided in half). In his experience (so he told me) the split-into-components version has just as much adverse event for the specific vaccine as does the whole dose (say, they react to the Pertussis part of the DTaP - if you give the P part full-volume but by itself, the kid STILL reacts just as poorly to the whole dose of P - either way, they’re getting enough to make them react, because it is the same quantity). He sees no difference in degree of reaction from the combined or the split - kids generally react in a non-additive sense, in his opinion. That is, the worst reaction they get is to one of the components, and that masks (rather than adds to) the milder reactions they get to the other components. If there is an increased reaction to the combined, it isn’t highly visible to him (of course, this is all anecdotal rather than scientific - he admits that, too).
However, again, in his experience, if you do a partial dose, it is more likely to be below the threshold of reaction, and then you give the other partial dose, and again, below the reaction threshold. 1/2DTaP means 1/2 of all the components, both times.
This is what we did for my son Brendan, who had a moderate adverse reaction to his second dose of DTaP (moderate in the clinical sense, not the personal - he had a moderate fever for three days, and had the high-pitched screaming for three+ hours straight, not immediately after the dose). We split the DTaP across two visits (two weeks apart), and he had almost no reaction at all (slight red mark around the site). It did mean an extra stick, but I nursed him while he got poked, and he just stopped nursing for a moment, then started again. No crying. (PHEW!) Extra PHEW for no reaction to the split dose.
Anecdotal, so not factual, but you might want to bring it up with your pediatrician. In our case, it being a small office, they labeled and retained the same vaccine vial (refrigerated) so we only paid for one vaccination. If they had needed to use two vials to get two half-doses, then we’d have had to pay for two vaccinations (cost was per vial dose, not ‘per shot’).
HTH. It is a hard question to answer. Best of luck making your decision.
