Vaccination Follow Up Info

Hello All,

I am glad that so far I have gotten a positive response to my last post. Like I said, it is something I feel passionate about. I am the kind of person who becomes emotionally involved in the stories I read on others' blogs. So I care about you guys and your little ones! If I can help someone make a rational decision about immunizing their child then I feel good about that. I at least want people to know the facts before they decide. I don't want people basing their decision on what some actress told Oprah about her singular experience.

By the way, did you know that JennyMcCarthy's child likely never had autism after all? And that she now admits that vaccines likely had nothing to do with his situation and that probably explains why he was able to be "cured"? Interesting how this didn't get widespread news coverage, isn't it? I just learned about it yesterday while gathering references for what I wrote!

I also want people to know that I am not telling you that there is no chance vaccines will injure your child. Vaccine injury has and will happen but the chances are FAR, FAR, FAR less than your child acquiring a dangerous, preventable disease if you do not have them vaccinated. There is usually a rare underlying cause that is aggravated by vaccinations, but this condition likely would have been stressed by something else down the road.

Anyway, one of the questions I got in my comments was about spacing out vaccinations a la the DrSears method. As I said yesterday, there is no research or rhyme or reason to the DrSears schedule while there is to the CDC schedule. That being said, I found a great article addressing parents fears about "overwhelming" their child's immune system with too many shots at one time. It is in the journal Pediatrics, which is the official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics. I will provide a link below and you can access it for free. I will summarize it here though because there may be a lot of terms that are unfamiliar to people not in this field.

First of all, before a baby is born it has been in a very sterile environment. A newborn has encountered very few if any pathogens. Antibodies are passed from the mother to the baby in utero but that is not the same as the baby's own body creating an immune response. Protection given by the mother will "wear off" within a few months. The same is true for any immune protection gained through breastfeeding. These protections, while helpful, are no where near as good as those the baby can develop itself. But the second a baby is born it is confronted with many pathogens it has obviously never seen before and the immune system immediately begins mounting a response to this. The GI tract of a baby is colonized with bacteria within hours of birth. So even at birth the baby's immune system is challenged with many different types of pathogens at once, just as with a combo immunization.

Second, vaccines today are different than they were in the past. In 1900 children were only immunized against smallpox. But that vaccine contained 200 antigens (proteins that can potentially spur the immune system to get to work). In 1980, when I was born, children were immunized against 7 diseases. Over the course of those immunizations over 3000 antigens were encountered. Today, while children are immunized for 11 diseases, the total antigens encountered over the course of the vaccines is about 125. That is because we are better at making vaccines today and we don't have to include so much "stuff". By "we" I mean the companies that make the vaccines of course, not me or my company.

The authors also estimated the capacity of the immune system. I won't go into the details because it gets all science-y but they predict that if all 11 current vaccines were given at one time only 0.1% of the immune system would be used. But they go on to say that truly, no portion of the immune system is ever "used up" because that system is constantly replenishing the cells and components involved.

Another final point is that if vaccines temporarily compromised your immune system we would expect children to be more prone to other diseases at the time of the shots but that is not the case. Also, children already sick do not have any problem handling vaccines.

Again, I am not a pediatrician and if you have questions you should always consult your pediatrician! But as with my last post, I am presenting the information I have used in making my decisions. I have heard all the same media hype and attention you have all heard so I looked into all of this before vaccinating Baby Girl. I now feel completely comfortable following her doctors recommendations.

There are potential negatives to spacing out vaccines more than the CDC recommends. The most obvious being that you are postponing protection for your baby. The longer you wait, the more time they have to contract that disease. Also, doctors are concerned that parents will not come back or forget to complete the other vaccines. Vaccines are more likely to be not given if the parent has to keep coming back. But I know you ladies are vigilant parents and if you choose that route you will follow through!

I'm not going to lie, Baby Girl was not happy this past weekend after she received her 2-month vaccinations on Saturday. Part is probably attributed to physical pain at the injection sites but part is attributed to her immune system at work. I got my DTP a few weeks ago and that sucker hurt like heck for several days! But she is now happy as a clam again and I feel better knowing she has some protection against some nasty diseases.

One last thing that is TOTALLY my opinion. There is research in this area but it is far from concrete. I personally feel that allergies are also on the rise because of the sterile environments we create today. Everything is wiped down with bleach all the time and everyone washes with antibacterial soap. I believe our immune systems are bored! They will start going after harmless things like our foods if they have nothing else to do. Babies and children need to get sick once in a while to exercise their immune systems! But that is what the common cold is for, not measles or polio. My OB told me not to eat peanut butter while I was pregnant because it could contribute to peanut allergies in the baby. That is totally counter intuitive to how the immune system works! And in fact I found medical articles that said exactly the opposite of what my doctor had told me. In countries where peanuts are introduced earlier there are fewer cases of peanut allergy. Plus, all my nauseous tummy would allow some days was peanut butter sandwiches! But this is just my theory and allergy research is another big area now along with autism research.

Here is a link to that article. If you actually try to read it and have any questions just let me know. Wait, actually I am giving a link to a page on the World Health Organization's website because I can't figure out how to copy/paste a web address here for some reason and this one is much shorter for me to type. The article I talked about is the first link under "Links and References".

www.who.int/vaccine_safety/topics/immune_overload/en/index.html