Vaccination

TO VACCINATE, OR NOT TO VACCINATE

TRUST ME, I'M NOT A DOCTOR

Catherine Eccles

One of the questions the parents of my small patients often ask, is "Should I have my child vaccinated?". It is not an easy one to answer because I am adamant that parents should make their own decisions on this emotive issue. I start by relating what happened with my own children, now six and three. Daughter number one received DTP, Hib and Polio three times when she was a small baby, and has had nothing since. Daughter number two is unvaccinated.

I remember taking my first child along to the clinic, feeling uneasy, but with my head buried in the sand. After all, once the immunisations were done, I couldn't worry about it any more. In fact the opposite has happened. When I notice the extreme vitality of my unvaccinated daughter and compare it to her not quite so robust immunised sister, I wonder if there is a connection. (The other day, a mother of two girls who are patients of mine, one vaccinated, the other not, made exactly the same observation of her children). Last year, I gave my elder daughter a course of homoeopathic treatment designed to undo any side-effects of vaccination. It is difficult to assess whether this had any effect, but it did ease my conscience a little.

Guilt and fear are the driving emotions of the vaccination debate. We are guilty, if we don't vaccinate, of exposing society to the risk of "dangerous" diseases and of unnecessarily gambling with our children's well-being, who will surely suffer from permanent damage from the side-effects of childhood illnesses. We are guilty, if we do vaccinate, of undermining our children's immune systems, of exposing them to a higher risk of dying of cot death, or developing autism, and of playing Russian roulette with a myriad of post-vaccination syndromes such as glue-ear, chronic catarrh, eczema, asthma and so on.

It all depends on which side of the fence you decide to sit. If the arguments from either side seem too black and white, you can stay in the grey areas by sitting on the fence and delaying the decision (my initial approach with my unvaccinated daughter). This, at least, gives your child's immune system time to strengthen, before several diseases are simultaneously introduced directly into the blood stream by a needle. If you stay on the fence for long enough, you may become comfortable with the idea of living with an unvaccinated child and keep it that way, but you still have not made an informed decision.

Behaviour within the camps on each side of the fence can be very extreme. An unforgettable moment was the U.K. advertising campaign in 1994, when it was decided by the Chief Medical Officer that all school-aged children should receive an extra measles and rubella booster. As the camera panned closer and closer to an intensive care unit, the words "Heart Attack?", "Accident?"…"No, measles" came up on the screen. This irresponsible exaggeration of the dangers of a normal and, if well-managed, safe childhood disease was an irresponsible manipulation of every concerned parent's fears.

Fear works equally well in the other direction. In 1998, an extensively publicised report was published by Dr Andrew Wakefield from the Royal Free Hospital in London which linked the MMR vaccine to autism. As a result, the take-up rate for that vaccination fell from around 94% to 87% and consequently below the accepted level for the prevention of an epidemic. The reason for this was, for once, an anti-vaccination hypothesis came from within the conventional medical camp, and therefore carried the stamp of officialdom. What is more interesting is that the rest of the medical establishment wasted no time in gunning down Wakefield's research and now even the option of giving the MMR vaccination as three separate, single doses, Wakefield's recommendation, has been withdrawn. Often when a reaction is that quick and extreme, there is something to hide.

Or something to be gained. There is little doubt that vaccination programmes are designed to be confidence inspiring: the state caring for the nation's children. Why else was the MR campaign of 1994 carried out?. The government wanted to look good and (coincidentally?) was helping out the drugs companies who had overstocks of the vaccine, which were due to go past their expiry dates the very month of the campaign. The predicted world epidemic of measles the whole programme hung on never happened. Neither, it is claimed, was there ever any evidence for it.

And now we have a new vaccine for meningitis C. The leaflet issued by the Department of Health confidently claims that it has already been given to 25,000 people during the trials, 4,000 in the U.K. and 21,000 elsewhere. That's not very many. The U.K. is the first Western country to mount a nationwide meningitis C vaccination programme, for a vaccine that only finished its clinical trials in the summer. My own approach to this is one of caution, but, no doubt, parents will be eager to have their children vaccinated. Understandably so, as meningitis is the most scary of all and the drugs companies know that.

Before agreeing to have your child immunised against meningitis C, there are a few facts to consider:

Meningitis is not one of the eruptive childhood illnesses (which strengthen the immune system and are seen as beneficial to a child's overall development), but a fast moving, relatively dangerous infectious disease, which, on the whole, is better not to catch. That said, it is responsible for one hundred and fifty deaths a year, which is a small number when compared to child mortality from accidents in the home, or road deaths.

Most incidences of meningitis C occur in babies under one year old and in teenagers between the ages of fifteen and nineteen, so the value of vaccinating children who are between these age brackets is more limited.

Both the old meningitis C vaccine and the Hib vaccine (which is similar to the new meningitis C vaccine) have been shown to be relatively ineffective. It is therefore not clear that the new meningitis C vaccine will be any more efficacious.

The FDA in America has been advised to delay the meningitis C immunisation programme because of a possible link with diabetes. It is thought that mass vaccination in the U.S. may cause 28,000 cases of insulin dependent diabetes each year, a risk that far outweighs the risk of death from meningitis C.

In addition there are the general risks mentioned earlier, which are much more difficult to attribute. For the side effects of a vaccination to be officially recognised and entered into the statistics, they have to develop within forty eight hours of a child being immunised. This is an absurdly short timeframe. Complementary medicine practitioners and sceptical doctors therefore have to rely on the more incidental information gleaned from their practices, when simultaneous onset of glue ear, asthma, eczema and the like leads parents to their consulting rooms. They are then able to give advice according to their individual and collective experience.

This is one of the problems. Because neither camp is prepared to give a balanced view either for or against vaccination, it is up to the people at grass roots level to give an opinion based on anecdotal evidence. For example: since the whooping cough vaccine was delayed until after twenty four months of age in Japan, the incidence of cot death has dropped dramatically. The disadvantage of this approach is it opens the door to misinformation and scare mongering and manipulates parents into making panicked, emotive decisions rather than balanced, informed ones.

On the other side of the fence the government and the medical establishment are unable give out the more unsavoury facts about immunisation, such as every known case of polio in the US during the last fifteen years has been caused by the live polio vaccine. Governments have to support a full vaccination programme, not just because of political and commercial considerations: if vaccination take-up rates fall below 90%, then epidemics can occur. Imagine the embarrassment in a measles epidemic when a large proportion of those affected have been vaccinated against measles. The claim that immunisation is solely responsible for the near eradication of diseases, which were already in decline when their respective vaccines were introduced, would no longer hold water. Improved sanitation and nutrition would also have to be factored into the equation. Then the validity of vaccination itself would come into question, and the whole façade would fall like a pack of cards.

In the meantime parents have a choice: to sit on the fence, bury their heads in the sand or to get out there and inform themselves as best they can. Thanks to the world wide web where there is an unfathomable amount of information, both good and bad, this task in becoming much easier.

Catherine Eccles. January 2000

WHAT ARE VACCINES MADE OF?

These are details of the components of some of the childhood vaccines:

DTP: Diphtheria bacterium, pertussis organisms, tetanus toxoid, sodium chloride, sodium hydroxide, formaldehyde, hydrochloric acid, aluminium and mercury.

MMR: Live measles virus, live mumps virus, live rubella virus, chick embryo, human foetal cells, neomycin (a antibiotic, usually considered too toxic for administration by any route other than the mouth or the bowel, used to sterilise the bowel prior to surgery), sorbitol (an artifical sweetener), gelatine.

Polio (the live oral vaccine used in the UK and the US): Three types of live polio virus, magnesium chloride, amino acid, polysorbate 80, purified water, neomycin, sulphate, streptomycin (an antibiotic used for the treatment of tuberculosis), penicillin, monkey kidney cell cultures.

C.E.

HOW TO FIND INFORMATION

Whereas pro-vaccination information is easily obtainable from your doctor, it is not so obvious where to find the other side of the story. These web sites may be helpful.

http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/WAXHAW/vaccine1.htm
Vaccine Scepticism: Adverse Effects and Alternatives. Balanced and informative article on the history of childhood vaccination, with details of the vaccines, their components, efficacy and side effects, profiles of each disease in question and some sensible guidelines for parents.

http://www.van.org.uk
New site of the UK based National Vaccination Information Centre with fact sheets on all childhood vaccines (including Meningitis C)

http://www.909shot.com
Site of the Virginia US based National Vaccine Information Center, founded in 1982 by parents whose children who were injured or died after being vaccinated.

http://www.unc.edu/~aphillip/www/vaccine/informed.htm
Well researched article dispelling the myths of vaccination, written by
investigative writer who specialises in vaccination risks and alternatives.

http://www.ino.it/~lois/vaccine.htm
Extensive list of vaccination sites.

C.E.