The greatest threat of childhood diseases lies in the dangerous and ineffectual efforts made to prevent them through mass immunization.
I know, as I write that line, that this concept is one that you may find difficult to accept. Immunizations have been so artfully and aggressively marketed that most parents believe them to be the “miracle” that has eliminated many once-feared diseases. Consequently, for anyone to oppose them borders on the foolhardy. For a pediatrician to attack what has become the “bread and butter” of pediatric practice is equivalent to a priest’s denying the infallibility of the pope.
Knowing that, I can only hope that you will keep an open mind while I present my case. Much of what you have been led to believe about immunizations simply isn’t true. I not only have grave misgivings about them; if I were to follow my deep convictions in writing this, I would urge you to reject all inoculations for your child. I won’t do that, because parents in about half the states have lost the right to make that choice. Doctors, not politicians, have successfully lobbied for laws that force parents to immunize their children as a prerequisite for admission to school.
Even in those states, though, you may be able to persuade your pediatrician to eliminate the pertussis (whooping cough) component from the DPT vaccine.
This immunization, which appears to be the most threatening of them all, is the subject of so much controversy that many doctors are becoming nervous about giving it, fearing malpractice suits. They should be nervous, because in a recent Chicago case a child damaged by a pertussis inoculation received a $3.3 million settlement award. If your doctor is in that state of mind, exploit his fear, because your child’s health is at stake.
Although I administered them myself during my early years of practice, I have become a steadfast opponent of mass inoculations because of the myriad hazards they present. The subject is so vast and complex that it deserves a book of its own. Consequently, I must be content here with summarizing my objections to the fanatic zeal with which pediatricians blindly shoot foreign proteins into the body of your child without knowing what eventual damage they may cause.
Here is the core of my concern:
1. There is no convincing scientific evidence that mass inoculations can be credited with eliminating any childhood disease. While it is true that some once common childhood diseases have diminished or disappeared since inoculations were introduced, no one really knows why, although improved living conditions may be the reason. If immunizations were responsible for the disappearance of these diseases in the United States, one must ask why they disappeared simultaneously in Europe, where mass immunizations did not take place.
2. It is commonly believed that the Salk vaccine was responsible for halting the polio epidemics that plagued American children in the 1940s and 1950s. If so, why did the epidemics also end in Europe, where polio vaccine was not so extensively used? Of greater current relevance, why is the Sabin live virus vaccine still being administered to children when Dr. Jonas Salk, who pioneered the first vaccine, points out that Sabin vaccine is now causing most of the polio cases that appear. Continuing to force this vaccine on children is irrational medical behavior that simply confirms my contention that doctors consistently repeat their mistakes. With the polio vaccine we are witnessing a rerun of the medical reluctance to abandon the smallpox vaccination, which remained as the only source of smallpox-related deaths for three decades after the disease had disappeared.
Think of it! For 30 years kids died from smallpox vaccinations even though no longer threatened by the disease.
3. There are significant risks associated with every immunization and numerous contraindications that may make it dangerous for the shots to be given to your child. Yet doctors administer them routinely, usually without warning parents of the hazards and without determining whether the immunization is contraindicated for the child. No child should be immunized without making that determination, yet small armies of children are routinely lined up in clinics to receive a shot in the arm with no questions asked!
4. While the myriad short-term hazards of most immunizations are known (but rarely explained), no one knows the long-term consequences of injecting foreign proteins into the body of your child. Even more shocking is the fact that no one is making any structured effort to find out.
5. There is a growing suspicion that immunization against relatively harmless childhood diseases may be responsible for the dramatic increase in autoimmune diseases since mass inoculations were introduced. These are fearful diseases such as cancer, leukemia, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, Lou Gehrig’s disease, lupus erythematosus, and the Guillain-Barre syndrome. An autoimmune disease can be explained simply as one in which the body’s defense mechanisms cannot distinguish between foreign invaders and ordinary body tissues, with the consequence that the body begins to destroy itself. Have we traded mumps and measles for cancer and leukemia?
I have emphasized these concerns because it is probable that your pediatrician will not advise you about them. At the 1982 Forum of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), a resolution was proposed that would have helped insure that parents would be informed about the risks and benefits of immunizations. The resolution urged that the “AAP make available in clear, concise language information which a reasonable parent would want to know about the benefits and risks of routine immunizations, the risks of vaccine preventable diseases and the management of common adverse reactions to immunizations.” Apparently the doctors assembled did not believe that “reasonable parents” were entitled to this kind of information because they rejected the resolution!
The bitter controversy over immunizations that is now raging within the medical profession has not escaped the attention of the media. Increasing numbers of parents are rejecting immunizations for their children and facing the legal consequences of doing so. Parents whose children have been permanently damaged by vaccines are no longer accepting this as fate but are filing malpractice suits against the manufacturers and the doctors who administered the vaccine. Some manufacturers have actually stopped making vaccines, and the lists of contraindications to their use are being expanded by the remaining manufacturers, year by year. Meanwhile, because routine immunizations that bring patients back for repeated office calls are the bread and butter of their specialty, pediatricians continue to defend them to the death.
The question parents should be asking is: Whose death?
As a parent, only you can decide whether to reject immunizations or risk accepting them for your child. Let me urge you, though — before your child is immunized — to arm yourself with the facts about the potential risks and benefits and demand that your pediatrician defend the immunizations that he recommends.
I am not going to try to cover all of the more obscure, life-threatening diseases here. However, in the remaining paragraphs here, I will describe the most common diseases, one or more of which may affect your child.
MUMPS
Mumps is a relatively innocuous viral disease, usually experienced in childhood, which causes swelling of one or both of the salivary glands (parotids), located just below and in front of the ears. Typical symptoms are a temperature of 100-104 degrees, appetite loss, headache, and back pain. The gland swelling usually begins to diminish after two or three days and is gone by the sixth or seventh day. However, one gland may become affected first, and the second as much as 10 – 12 days later. The infection of either side confers lifetime immunity.
Mumps does not require medical treatment. If your child contracts the disease, encourage him to stay in bed for two or three days, feed him a soft diet and a lot of fluids, and use ice packs to reduce the swelling. If his headache is severe, administer modest quantities of whiskey or acetaminophen. Give 10 drops of whiskey to a small baby and up to one-half teaspoon to a larger one. The dose can be repeated in one hour and once more in another hour, if needed.
Most children are immunized against mumps along with measles and rubella in the MMR shot that is administered at about 15 months of age. Pediatricians defend this immunization with the argument that, although mumps is not a serious disease in children, if they do not gain immunity as children they may contract mumps as adults. In that event there is a possibility that adult males may contract orchitis, a condition in which the disease affects the testicles. In rare instances this can produce sterility.
If total sterility as a consequence of orchitis were a significant threat, and if the mumps immunization assured adult males that they would not contract it, I would be among those doctors who urge immunization. I’m not, because their argument makes no sense. Orchitis rarely causes sterility, and when it does, because only one testicle is usually affected, the sperm production capacity of the unaffected testicle could repopulate the world! And that’s not all. No one knows whether the mumps vaccination confers an immunity that lasts into the adult years. Consequently, there is an open question whether, when your child is immunized against mumps at 15 months and escapes this disease in childhood, he may suffer more serious consequences when he contracts it as an adult.
If the mumps immunization is given to protect adult males from orchitis, not to prevent children from getting mumps, it would seem reasonable to administer it only to those males who haven’t developed natural immunity by the time they reach puberty. They would then be more certain of protection as adults. All girls and countless boys would thus avoid the potential consequences of a hazardous vaccine.
You won’t find pediatricians advertising them, but the side effects of the mumps vaccine can be severe. In some children it causes allergic reactions such as rash, itching, and bruising. It may also expose them to the effects of central nervous system involvement, including febrile seizures, unilateral nerve deafness, and encephalitis. The risks are minimal, true, but why should your child endure them at all to avoid an innocuous disease in childhood at the risk of contracting a more serious one as an adult?
MEASLES
Measles, also called rubeola or “English measles,” is a contagious viral disease that can be contracted by touching an object used by an infected person. At the onset the victim feels tired, has a slight fever and pains in the head and back. His eyes redden and he may be sensitive to light. The fever rises until about the third or fourth day, when it reaches 103 – 104 degrees. Sometimes small white spots can be seen inside the mouth, and a rash of small pink spots appears below the hairline and behind the ears. This rash spreads downward to cover the body in about 36 hours. The pink spots may run together but fade away in about three or four days. Measles is contagious for seven or eight days, beginning three or four days before the rash appears. Consequently, if one of your children contracts the disease, the others probably will have been exposed to it before you know the first child is sick.
No treatment is required for measles other than bed rest, fluids to combat possible dehydration from fever, and calamine lotion or cornstarch baths to relieve the itching. If the child suffers from photo phobia, the blinds in his bedroom should be lowered to darken the room. However, contrary to the popular myth, there is no danger of permanent blindness from this disease.
A vaccine to prevent measles is another element of the MMR inoculation given in early childhood. Doctors maintain that the inoculation is necessary to prevent measles encephalitis, which they say occurs about once in 1,000 cases. After decades of experience with measles, I question this statistic, and so do many other pediatricians. The incidence of 1/1000 may be accurate for children who live in conditions of poverty and malnutrition, but in the middle- and upper-income brackets, if one excludes simple sleepiness from the measles itself, the incidence of true encephalitis is probably more like 1/10,000 or 1/100,000.
After frightening you with the unlikely possibility of measles encephalitis, your doctor can rarely be counted on to tell you of the dangers associated with the vaccine he uses to prevent it. The measles vaccine is associated with encephalopathy and with a series of other complications such as SSPE (subacute sclerosing panencephalitis), which causes hardening of the brain and is invariably fatal.
Other neurologic and sometimes fatal conditions associated with the measles vaccine include ataxia (inability to coordinate muscle movements), mental retardation, aseptic meningitis, seizure disorders, and hemiparesis (paralysis affecting one side of the body). Secondary complications associated with the vaccine may be even more frightening. They include encephalitis, subacute sclerosing panencephalitis, multiple sclerosis, toxic epidermal necrolysis, anaphylactic shock, Reye’s syndrome, Guillain-Barre syndrome, blood clotting disorders, juvenile-onset diabetes, and even a relationship with Hodgkin’s disease and cancer.
I would consider the risks associated with measles vaccination unacceptable even if there were convincing evidence that the vaccine works. There isn’t. While there has been a decline in the incidence of the disease, it began long before the vaccine was introduced. In 1958 there were about 800,000 cases of measles in the United States, but by 1962 — the year before a vaccine appeared — the number of cases had dropped by 300,000. During the next four years, while children were being vaccinated with an ineffective and now abandoned “killer virus” vaccine, the number of cases dropped another 300,000. In 1900 there were 13.3 measles deaths per 100,000 population. By 1955, before the first measles shot, the death rate had declined 97.7 percent to only 0.03 deaths per 100,000.
Those numbers alone are dramatic evidence that measles was disappearing before the vaccine was introduced. If you fail to find them sufficiently convincing, consider this: in a 1978 survey of 30 states, more than half of the children who contracted measles had been adequately vaccinated. Moreover, according to the World Health Organization, the chances are about 15 times greater that measles will be contracted by those vaccinated for them than by those who are not.
“Why,” you may ask, “in the face of these facts, do doctors continue to give the shots?” The answer may lie in an episode that occurred in California 14 years after the measles vaccine was introduced. Los Angeles suffered a severe measles epidemic during that year, and parents were urged to vaccinate all children six months of age and older — despite a Public Health warning that vaccinating children below the age of one year was useless and potentially harmful.
Although Los Angeles doctors responded by routinely shooting measles vaccine into every kid they could get their hands on, several local physicians familiar with the suspected problems of immunologic failure and “slow virus” dangers chose not to vaccinate their own infant children. Unlike their patients, who weren’t told, they realized that “slow viruses” found in all live vaccines, and particularly in the measles vaccine, can hide in human tissue for years. They may emerge later in the form of encephalitis, multiple sclerosis, and as potential seeds for the development and growth of cancer.
One Los Angeles physician who refused to vaccinate his own 7-month-old-baby said: “I’m worried about what happens when the vaccine virus may not only offer little protection against measles but may also stay around in the body, working in a way we don’t know much about.” His concern about the possibility of these consequences for his own child, however, did not cause him to stop vaccinating his infant patients. He rationalized this contradictory behavior with the comment that “As a parent, I have the luxury of making a choice for my child. As a physician . . . legally and professionally I have to accept the recommendations of the profession, which is what we also had to do with the whole Swine flu-business.”
Perhaps it is time that lay parents and their children are granted the same luxury that doctors and their children enjoy.
RUBELLA
Commonly known as “German measles,” rubella is a non-threatening disease in children that does not require medical treatment. The initial symptoms are fever and a slight cold, accompanied by a sore throat. You know it is something more when a rash appears on the face and scalp and spreads to the arms and body. The spots do not run together as they do with measles, and they usually fade away after two or three days. The victim should be encouraged to rest and be given adequate fluids, but no other treatment is needed.
The threat posed by rubella is the possibility that it may cause damage to the fetus if a woman contracts the disease during the first trimester of pregnancy. This fear is used to justify the immunization of all children, boys and girls, as part of the MMR inoculation. The merits of this vaccine are questionable for essentially the same reasons that apply to mumps inoculations. There is no need to protect children from this harmless disease, so the adverse reactions to the vaccine are unacceptable in terms of benefit to the child. They can include arthritis, arthralgia (painful joints), and polyneuritis, which produces pain, numbness, or tingling in the peripheral nerves. While these symptoms are usually temporary, they may last for several months and may not occur until as long as two months after the vaccination. Because of that time lapse, parents may not identify the cause when these symptoms appear in their vaccinated child.
The greater danger of rubella vaccination is the possibility that it may deny expectant mothers the protection of natural immunity from the disease. By preventing rubella in childhood, immunization may actually increase the threat that women will contract rubella during their childbearing years. My concern on this score is shared by many other doctors. In Connecticut a group of doctors, led by two eminent epidemiologists, have actually succeeded in getting rubella stricken from the list of legally required immunizations.
Study after study has demonstrated that many women immunized against rubella as children lack evidence of immunity in blood tests given during their adolescent years. Other tests have shown a high vaccine failure rate in children given rubella, measles, and mumps shots, either separately or in combined form. Finally, the crucial question yet to be answered is whether vaccine-induced immunity is as effective and long-lasting as immunity from the natural disease of rubella. A large proportion of children show no evidence of immunity in blood tests given only four or five years after rubella vaccination.
The significance of this is both obvious and frightening. Rubella is a nonthreatening disease in childhood, and it confers natural immunity to those who contract it so they will not get it again as adults. Prior to the time that doctors began giving rubella vaccinations an estimated 85 percent of adults were naturally immune to the disease.
Today, because of immunization, the vast majority of women never acquire natural immunity. If their vaccine-induced immunity wears off, they may contract rubella while they are pregnant, with resulting damage to their unborn children.
Being a skeptical soul, I have always believed that the most reliable way to determine what people really believe is to observe what they do, not what they say. If the greatest threat of rubella is not to children, but to the fetus yet unborn, pregnant women should be protected against rubella by making certain that their obstetricians won’t give them the disease. Yet, in a California survey reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association, more than 90 percent of the obstetrician-gynecologists refused to be vaccinated. If doctors themselves are afraid of the vaccine, why on earth should the law require that you and other parents allow them to administer it to your kids?
WHOOPING COUGH
Whooping cough (pertussis) is an extremely contagious bacterial disease that is usually transmitted through the air by an infected person. The incubation period is 7 – 14 days. The initial symptoms are indistinguishable from those of a common cold: a runny nose, sneezing, listlessness and loss of appetite, some tearing in the eyes, and sometimes a mild fever.
As the disease progresses, the victim develops a severe cough at night. Later it appears during the day, as well. Within a week to 10 days after the first symptoms appear the cough will become paroxysmal. The child may cough a dozen times with each breath, and his face may darken to a bluish or purple hue. Each coughing bout ends with a whooping intake of breath, which accounts for the popular name for the disease. Vomiting is often an additional symptom of the disease.
Whooping cough can strike within any age group, but more than half of all victims are below two years of age. It can be serious and even life-threatening, particularly in infants. Infected persons can transmit the disease to others for about a month after the appearance of the initial symptoms, so it is important that they be isolated, especially from other children.
If your child contracts whooping cough, there is no specific treatment that your doctor can provide, nor is there any you can apply at home, other than to encourage your child to rest and to provide comfort and consolation. Cough suppressants are sometimes used, but they rarely help very much and I don’t recommend them. However, if an infant contracts the disease, you should consult a doctor because hospital care may be required. The primary threats to babies are exhaustion from coughing and pneumonia. Very young infants have even been known to suffer cracked ribs from the severe coughing bouts.
Immunization against pertussis is given along with vaccines for diphtheria and tetanus in the DPT inoculation. Although the vaccine has been used for decades, it is one of the most controversial of immunizations. Doubts persist about its effectiveness, and many doctors share my concern that the potentially damaging side effects of the vaccine may outweigh the alleged benefits.
Dr. Gordon T. Stewart, head of the department of community medicine at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, is one of the most vigorous critics of the pertussis vaccine. He says he supported the inoculation before 1974 but then began to observe outbreaks of pertussis in children who had been vaccinated. “Now, in Glasgow,” he says, “30 percent of our whooping cough cases are occurring in vaccinated patients. This leads me to believe that the vaccine is not all that protective.”
As in the case with other infectious diseases, mortality had begun to decline before the vaccine became available. The vaccine was not introduced until about 1936, but mortality from the disease had already been declining steadily since 1900 or earlier. According to Stewart, “the decline in pertussis mortality was 80 percent before the vaccine was ever used.” He shares my view that the key factor in controlling whooping cough is probably not the vaccine but improvement in the living conditions of potential victims.
Others in the profession do not deal kindly with doctors who raise questions about their cherished vaccines. In 1982 I appeared in a one-hour NBC television documentary devoted to the pertussis vaccine controversy and commented that “the danger [from the vaccine] is far greater than any doctors here have ever been willing to admit.” In July 1982, the Journal of the American Medical Association, in a bitter attack on the program charged that the network chose dubious ‘experts’ to badmouth the vaccine and endowed them with false credentials.” It then proceeded to attack my credentials.
I don’t feel any compulsion to defend myself from the American Medical Association which, over the years, has had to spend an inordinate portion of its budget in its own self-defense. It is instructive, however, to read what that same issue of the AMA Journal had to say about the risks of pertussis vaccine. I’ll cite what they had to say and let you judge whether it is inappropriate for me to raise questions about its use. For starters, JAMA said this:
“To health professionals, of course, the dangers of DPT are nothing new. The D and T components, which were given long before the P was added in the late 1940s, are partially purified toxoids considered to carry little risk. The whole-cell P component, consisting of 4 units of protective pertussis antigen per 0.5 ml of DPT is universally acknowledged to be relatively crude and toxic, and the advent of a safer version is eagerly awaited.
“Almost from the inception of widespread DPT immunization, severe reactions have been reported, beginning with Byers’s and Moll’s study of vaccine-associated encephalopathy in 1948. The incidence of such reactions has not been firmly established. It does seem fairly certain that vaccine-associated seizures, unusual as they are, are considerably more common than brain damage or residual impairment secondary to such seizures.”
It is obvious from this statement that the American Medical Association does not deny that pertussis vaccine is hazardous, with the potential of frightening side effects. Their concern is over the fact that media attention is making the recipients of the vaccine aware of the risks!
If it is improper for a doctor to share with his patients his knowledge of the risks of immunization, I plead guilty to the charge. The common side effects of the pertussis vaccine, acknowledged by JAMA, are fever, crying bouts, a shock-like state, and local skin effects such as swelling, redness, and pain. Less frequent but more serious side effects include convulsions and permanent brain damage resulting in mental retardation. The vaccine has also been linked to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). In 1978-79, during an expansion of the Tennessee childhood immunization program, eight cases of SIDS were reported immediately following routine DPT immunization.
Estimates of the number of those vaccinated with the pertussis vaccine who are protected from the disease range from 50 percent to 80 percent. According to JAMA, reported cases of whooping cough in the United States total an average of 1,000-3,000 per year and deaths 5-20 per year.
My question is: Does it make sense to expose millions of children each year to the potential hazards of the vaccine in order to provide them with dubious protection against a disease that is so rarely seen?
DIPHTHERIA
Although it was one of the most feared of childhood diseases in grandma’s day, diphtheria has now almost disappeared. Only five cases were reported in the United States in 1980. Most doctors insist that the decline is due to immunization with the DPT vaccine, but there is ample evidence that the incidence of diphtheria was already diminishing before a vaccine became available.
Diphtheria is a highly contagious bacterial disease that is spread by the coughing and sneezing of infected persons or by handling items that they have touched. The incubation period for the disease is two to five days, and the first symptoms are a sore throat, headache, nausea, coughing, and a fever of 100-104 degrees. As the disease progresses, dirty-white patches can be observed on the tonsils and in the throat. They cause swelling in the throat and larnyx that makes swallowing difficult and, in severe cases, may obstruct breathing to the point that the victim chokes to death. The disease requires medical attention and can be treated with antibiotics such as penicillin or erythromycin.
Today your child has about as much chance of contracting diphtheria as he does of being bitten by a cobra. Yet millions of children are immunized against it with repeated injections at 2, 4, 6 and 18 months and then given a booster shot when they enter school. This despite evidence over more than a dozen years from rare outbreaks of the disease that children who have been immunized fare no better than those who have not. During a 1969 outbreak of diphtheria in Chicago, the city board of health reported that 4 of the 16 victims had been fully immunized against the disease and 5 others had received one or more doses of the vaccine. Two of the latter showed evidence of full immunity. A report on another outbreak in which three people died revealed that one of the fatal cases and 14 of 23 carriers had been fully immunized.
Episodes such as these shatter the argument that immunization can be credited with eliminating diphtheria or any of the other once common childhood diseases. If immunization deserved the credit, how do its defenders explain this? Only about half the states have legal requirements for immunization against infectious diseases, and the percentage of children immunized varies from state to state. As a consequence, tens of thousands — perhaps millions — of children in areas where medical services are limited and pediatricians almost nonexistent were never immunized against infectious diseases and therefore should be vulnerable to them. Yet the incidence of infectious diseases does not correlate in any respect with whether a state has legally mandated mass immunization or not.
In view of the rarity of the disease, the effective antibiotic treatment now available, the questionable effectiveness of the vaccine, the multimillion-dollar annual cost of administering it, and the ever-present potential for harmful, long-term effects from this or any other vaccine, I consider continued mass immunization against diphtheria indefensible. I grant that no significant harmful effects from the vaccine have been identified, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there. In the half-century that the vaccine has been used no research has ever been undertaken to determine what the long-term effects of the vaccine may be!
CHICKEN POX
This is my favorite childhood disease, first because it is relatively innocuous and second because it is one of the few for which no pharmaceutical manufacturer has yet marketed a vaccine. That second reason may be short-lived, though, because as this is written there are reports that a chicken pox vaccine soon may appear.
Chicken pox is a communicable viral infection that is very common in children. The first signs of the disease are usually a slight fever, headache, backache, and loss of appetite.
After a day or two, small red spots appear, and within a few hours they enlarge and become blisters. Ultimately a scab forms that peels off, usually within a week or two. This process is accompanied by severe itching, and the child should be encouraged not to scratch the sores. Calamine lotion may be applied, or cornstarch baths given, to relieve the itching.
It is not necessary to seek medical treatment for chicken pox. The patient should be encouraged to rest and to drink a lot of fluids to prevent dehydration from the fever.
The incubation period for chicken pox is from two to three weeks, and the disease is contagious for about two weeks, beginning two days after the rash appears. The child should be isolated during this period to avoid spreading the disease to others.
SCARLET FEVER
Scarlet fever is another example of a once feared disease that has virtually disappeared. If a vaccine had ever been developed for it, doctors would undoubtedly credit that with the elimination of the disease. Since there is no vaccine, they give the credit to penicillin, despite the fact that the disease was already disappearing before the first antibiotics appeared. In all probability, as with other diseases, the true reason for its waning incidence is improved living conditions and better nutrition.
The disease got its name from the red rash that covers the body of victims. It is caused by a streptococcus infection, and the initial symptoms are vomiting, headache, a swelling of the lymph nodes in the neck, and a fever of 101-105 degrees. The disease usually affects children between the ages of two and eight, and the rash that accompanies it fades in about a week. If your child contracts scarlet fever, which is most unlikely, you need not be alarmed because it is no more dangerous than a strep throat infection. It will disappear by itself, but if you take your child to a doctor, he is likely to prescribe an antibiotic that your child really doesn’t need.
MENINGITIS
One of the appalling inconsistencies of contemporary medical practice is the tendency of doctors to over-treat the diseases that don’t require treatment, and miss the diagnosis in diseases like meningitis that deserve all of the skill they have to offer. This disease is an inflammation of the membranes that cover the brain and. the spinal cord, called the meninges. The symptoms may include a stiff neck (but not necessarily), a persistent headache, vomiting, fever, and convulsions in infants. Bacterial, viral, and fungal infections can cause the disease. One of the bacterial types is particularly contagious because the bacteria are found in the throat as well as in the cerebro-spinal fluid.
Meningitis is amenable to treatment, but early diagnosis is essential. Doctors often miss the diagnosis because they fail to take the mother seriously when she reports significant changes in her child’s behavior. Many also fail to give serious consideration to the possibility of meningitis unless the child has a stiff neck.
Potential consequences of failure to diagnose and treat meningitis properly are mental retardation and death. If your child has an unexplained fever for three or four days, accompanied by drowsiness, vomiting, a shrill cry, and possibly a stiff neck, it is time to suspect meningitis. Some of these symptoms are also present with influenza. You can distinguish meningitis by the last two, particularly the shrill cry. If your child has this, insist that your doctor perform the appropriate tests, which may include a spinal tap. In that event, if he doesn’t find the spinal canal on the first or second attempt, tell him to stop trying and call another doctor.
Antibiotics have reduced mortality from this dread disease from 95 percent to 5 percent. That’s why correct, early diagnosis of the disease is a matter of life or death.
TUBERCULOSIS
Parents should have the right to assume, and most do assume, that the tests their doctor gives their child will produce an accurate result. The tuberculin skin test is but one example of a medical test procedure in which that is definitely not the case. Even the American Academy of Pediatrics, which rarely has anything negative to say about procedures that its members routinely employ, has issued a policy statement that is critical of this test. According to the statement:
“Several recent studies have cast doubt on the sensitivity of some screening tests for tuberculosis. Indeed a panel assembled by the Bureau of Biologies has recommended to manufacturers that each lot be tested in 50 known positive patients to assure that preparations that are marketed are potent enough to identify everyone with active tuberculosis. However, since many of these studies have not been conducted in a randomized, double-blind fashion and/or have included many simultaneously administered skin tests (thus the possibility of suppression of reactions), interpretation of the tests is difficult.”
The statement concludes, “Screening tests for tuberculosis are not perfect, and physicians must be aware of the possibility that some false negative as well as positive reactions may be obtained.”
In short, your child may have tuberculosis, even though there is a negative reading on his tuberculin test. Or he may not have it but display a positive skin test that says he does. With many doctors, this can lead to some devastating consequences. Almost certainly, if this happens to your child, he will be exposed to needless and hazardous radiation from one or more x-rays of his chest. The doctor may then place him on dangerous drugs such as isoniazid for months or years “to prevent the development of tuberculosis.” Even the AMA has recognized that doctors have indiscriminately over-prescribed isoniazid. That’s shameful, because of the drug’s long list of side effects on the nervous system, gastrointestinal system, blood, bone marrow, skin, and endocrine glands. Also not to be overlooked is the danger that your child may become a pariah in your neighborhood because of the lingering fear of this infectious disease.
I am convinced that the potential consequences of a positive tuberculin skin test are more dangerous than the threat of the disease. I believe parents should reject the test unless they have specific knowledge that their child has been in contact with someone who has the disease.
SUDDEN INFANT DEATH SYNDROME (SIDS)
The dreadful possibility that they may awaken some morning to find their baby dead in his crib is a fear that lurks in the minds of many parents. Medical science has yet to pinpoint the cause of SIDS, but the most popular explanation among researchers appears to be that the central nervous system is somehow affected so that the involuntary act of breathing is suppressed.
That is a logical explanation, but it leaves unanswered the question: What caused the malfunction in the central nervous system? My suspicion, which is shared by others in my profession, is that the nearly 10,000 SIDS deaths that occur in the United States each year are related to one or more of the vaccines that are routinely given children. The pertussis vaccine is the most likely villain, but it could also be one or more of the others.
Dr. William Torch, of the University of Nevada School of Medicine at Reno, has issued a report suggesting that the DPT shot may be responsible for SIDS cases. He found that two-thirds of 103 children who died of SIDS had been immunized with DPT vaccine in the three weeks before their deaths, many dying within a day after getting the shot. He asserts that this was not mere coincidence, concluding that a “causal relationship is suggested” in at least some cases of DPT vaccine and crib death. Also on record are the Tennessee deaths, referred to earlier. In that case the manufacturer of the vaccine, following intervention by the U.S. surgeon general, recalled all unused doses of this batch of vaccine.
More recently, in 1983, the department of pediatrics of the UCLA School of Medicine and the Los Angeles County health department reported another disturbing study of 145 SIDS victims. Of this number, 53 had received DPT immunizations in close proximity to their deaths. Twenty-seven died within 28 days of being immunized, 17 of those within a week after receiving the DPT shot, and six within 24 hours of receiving it. The researchers concluded that these findings “further substantiate a possible association” between DPT shots and SIDS.
Expectant mothers who are concerned about SIDS should bear in mind the importance of breastfeeding to avoid this and other serious ailments. There is evidence that breastfed babies are less susceptible to allergies, respiratory disease, gastroenteritis, hypocalcemia, obesity, multiple sclerosis, and SIDS. One study of the scientific literature about SIDS concluded that “Breastfeeding can be seen as a common block to the myriad of pathways to SIDS.”
POLIOMYELITIS
No one who lived through the 1940s and saw photos of children in iron lungs, saw a President of the United States confined to his wheelchair by this dread disease, and was forbidden to use public beaches for fear of catching polio can forget the fear that prevailed at the time. Polio is virtually nonexistent today, but much of that fear persists, and there is a popular belief that immunization can be credited with eliminating the disease. That’s not surprising, considering the high-powered campaign that promoted the vaccine, but the fact is that no credible scientific evidence exists that the vaccine caused polio to disappear. As noted earlier, it also disappeared in other parts of the world where the vaccine was not so extensively used.
What is important to parents of this generation is the evidence that points to mass inoculation against polio as the cause of most remaining cases of the disease. In September 1977 Jonas Salk, the developer of the killed polio virus vaccine, testified along with other scientists to that effect. He said that most of the handful of polio cases which had occurred in the U.S. since the early 1970s probably were the by-product of the live polio vaccine that is in standard use in the United States. In Finland and Sweden there have been no cases of polio in more than a decade, but in those countries the killed virus vaccine is used almost exclusively.
Meanwhile, there is an ongoing debate among the immunologists regarding the relative risks of killed virus vs. live virus vaccine. Supporters of the killed virus vaccine maintain that it is the presence of live virus organisms in the other product that is responsible for the polio cases that occasionally appear. Supporters of the live virus type argue that the killed virus vaccine offers inadequate protection and actually increases the susceptibility of those vaccinated to the disease.
This affords me a rare opportunity to be comfortably neutral. I believe that both factions are right and that use of either of the vaccines will increase, not diminish, the possibility that your child will contract the disease.
In short, it appears that the most effective way to protect your child from polio is to make sure that he doesn’t get the vaccine!
INFECTIOUS MONONUCLEOSIS
The symptoms of infectious mononucleosis resemble those of the common cold or influenza, so in its early stages it is not likely to be suspected or diagnosed. It usually affects children and young adults, and if your child is the victim, he will display fever, swollen glands, a sore throat, weakness, and fatigue. As the disease progresses, the symptoms may also include abdominal pain, nausea, headaches, chest pain, coughing, and several other less common symptoms.
If your child has these symptoms and they persist beyond the normal course of a common cold, he should see a doctor. If the doctor suspects mononucleosis, he will probably order a blood test, which will usually, although not always, determine whether mononucleosis is present. The disease usually runs its course in one to three weeks, but in extreme cases it may persist for weeks or even months.
The fact that mononucleosis, in its early stages, cannot be distinguished from other ailments such as the common cold need not concern you because there is no specific drug treatment for the disease. The treatment is what you would be giving your child in any event — bed rest and liberal fluids. Some doctors prescribe adrenal steroids such as prednisone for mononucleosis, but I believe they should be avoided except in extreme cases of the disease. They have serious side effects.
Excerpt from How To Raise A Healthy Child In Spite Of Your Doctor
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FURTHER REFERENCES
But Doctor About That Shot – The Risks Of Immunizations by Robert S. Mendelsohn
The People’s Doctor: A Medical Newsletter For Consumers (ARCHIVE)
Defending your Good Health – Robert Mendelsohn, M.D. & Barbara Sachsel (Side A)
Defending your Good Health – Robert Mendelsohn, M.D. & Barbara Sachsel (Side B)