Monday, January 12, 2009

Why are our children so sick?

One of the blogs that I (intermittently) watch is Barbara Loe Fisher's Vaccine Awakening. Fisher is co-founder and president of the National Vaccine Information Center (here and here). She began a grassroots campaign for informed consent after her son experienced vaccine injury (in his case, convulsion, shock, and brain inflammation hours after receiving a DPT shot). While she doesn't critique [antiviral] vaccines on the basis of fetal cell use, she does advocate informed consent across the board, which dovetails with our primary concern (that we not profit from the death of infants*).

However, there is much also to be said about critiquing vaccines from a medical standpoint. Here is a gem from her most recent post:
The argument that more vaccination will equal better health is an argument that is getting harder to make as one in two Americans suffers from chronic disease and America plummets to 39th in infant mortality while 25 percent of all children are suffering with learning disabilities, ADHD, severe allergies, autism, asthma, diabetes, inflammatory bowel disorder, rheumatoid arthritis and other chronic immune and brain disorders. The question that doctors and public health officials fear most is:

WHY IS THE MOST HIGHLY VACCINATED CHILD POPULATION IN THE WORLD SO SICK AND DISABLED?

- V.

*For a longer post on fetal cell-lines, read this.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Pure speculation here, but I have been wondering for some time whether there is a genetic component to allergic reactions.
By that I mean that I have noticed that in my own wider family there seems to be a much wider spread incidence of milk allergy in the next generation while my generation was raised heavily on cow's milk.

From the standpoint of an individual it seems that over-exposure for a period of time to some type of environmental factor can create an allergy later on when that factor has been removed. My own case in point, having spent much of my youth and several years afterward on farms in severe dust conditions, now, many years removed, I have a dust allergy.
Could this carry to another generation? Or is it the kind of thing that could only be passed to a child in the womb from the mother's own anti-body system?

Just curious. There seems, for example to be unusually high rates of peanut allergy lately, but my generation was raised on peanut butter.
Could a similar effect be taking place with respect to vaccines?

Anonymous said...

no connection. that's not how human body works.
regarding your allergy, you developed it because you came in contact with the "right" antigen. absolutely no connection with your farm years spent surrounded by "dust". it just happened.
regarding vaccines, there a lot of questions regarding their efficiency and secondary effects. i will just give you two examples:
1. varicella vaccine doesn't seem to be as efficient as it was believed initially; vaccinated population has a higher relapse rate comparative to "naturally immunized" population (that is, those who already got the disease). as weird as it seems, vaccinated people have more chances to get the disease.
2. some vaccines contain adjuvants, such as thimerisol; or contaminating DNA fragments (anti-viral vaccines are obtained using cell cultures, and these cells are sometimes immortal - similar to cancerous cells). when you inject these things into your body, you can't just ignore possible long term effects (changes in immunity, auto-immunity, and who knows what else).
think about it.