Boulder CO has been known to not vaccinate their children in fear of them causing autoimmune diseases etc. Working for a Vet ER in boulder I have even noticed that they refuse to vaccinate their pets for the same fears. Here is an interesting abstract of an article.
Addressing Parents’ Concerns: Do Vaccines Cause Allergic or Autoimmune Diseases? Paul A. Offit, MD* and Charles J. Hackett, PhD
* Division of Infectious Diseases, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, and the Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Division of Allergy, Immunology, and Transplantation, National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/content/full/111/3/653
Anecdotal case reports and uncontrolled observational studies in the medical literature claim that vaccines cause chronic diseases such as asthma, multiple sclerosis, chronic arthritis, and diabetes. Several biological mechanisms have been proposed to explain how vaccines might cause allergic or autoimmune diseases. For example, allergic diseases might be caused by prevention of early childhood infections (the "hygiene hypothesis"), causing a prolongation of immunoglobulin E-promoting T-helper cell type 2-type responses. However, vaccines do not prevent most common childhood infections, and large well-controlled epidemiologic studies do not support the hypothesis that vaccines cause allergies. Autoimmune diseases might occur after immunization because proteins on microbial pathogens are similar to human proteins ("molecular mimicry") and could induce immune responses that damage human cells. However, wild-type viruses and bacteria are much better adapted to growth in humans than vaccines and much more likely to stimulate potentially damaging self-reactive lymphocytes. Consistent with critical differences between natural infection and immunization, well-controlled epidemiologic studies do not support the hypothesis that vaccines cause autoimmunity.
Flaws in proposed biological mechanisms that explain how vaccines might cause chronic diseases are consistent with the findings of many well-controlled large epidemiologic studies that fail to show a causal relationship.
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I recently watched a clip on TV about a cheerleader who supposedly had a bad reaction to the flu shot.. Apparently she developed dystonia (a rare -1/1E6 neurological disorder) 10 days after having the vaccination.. The clip doesn't go into much more detail and it does say that people shouldn't be discouraged about getting the flu shot because of this one story. What do you guys think about this? I just thought it was relevant to this post. A link to the clip is below.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEN5KGwNGeo
It seems that the incidence of adverse reactions to certain approved vaccines is on a case by case basis and the few extreme reactions to these vaccines in regard to children could be the result of a number of interacting components within his/her body. For example it is possible that the vaccine could enhance an underlying chronic disease during childhood, still the vaccine-related allergies or autoimmune disease would be difficult to diagnose. As a parent what direction would you take? It seems that receiving the vaccine(s) or not both pose as risks especially for our children. For most people as patients they entrust their physicians to represent the truth and to provide the best healthcare information!
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