Public Letter to Harvey Fineberg, MD, PhD/vaccines/autism

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http://www.vaproject.org/converse/letter-to-fineberg-20070420.htm

Public Letter to Harvey Fineberg, MD, PhD

by Judy Converse, MPH, RD, LD

FROM

Judy Converse MPH, RD, LD

Nutrition Care for Children

1150 Maxwell Avenue

Boulder, CO 80304

TO

Harvey Fineberg, MD, PhD

President

Institute of Medicine

500 Fifth Street NW

Washington DC 20001

March 17, 2007

Dear Dr. Fineberg,

In your broad service and duty for public health, I make the following

appeal in earnest hope that it will be considered. I apologize for the

length of this letter, which addresses a complex topic.

My area of expertise is child nutrition. I hold graduate and undergraduate

degrees in nutrition, a license to practice nutrition (Massachusetts),

registration status from the Commission on Dietetic Registration, and

several years experience working with children.

I took a public health curriculum at the University of Hawaii and was well

indoctrinated into the successes of vaccines. The invaluable piece of this

education was that few of my classmates were white, or American. Most were

credentialed health administrators, physicians sent by their governments in

the Pacific Rim, Africa, or Asia to acquire skills for clinical or program

decision-making, such as you influence now. Needless to say I felt both

dwarfed and privileged to have these extraordinary people as classmates.

The problems they faced upon finishing their studies were not in the

American experience: Lack of access to clean water; extreme poverty;

rampant malnutrition and hunger in children; inadequate housing; excessive

infant and child mortality from infectious diseases now rare in the United

States.

But here is the problem: As you know, our own infant mortality rate is

worse than many of these countries. During my graduate days, this was an

embarrassment for our public health officials, and twenty years later, it

still is. Although IMR in the United States has dropped from 11.2 deaths

per thousand live births in 1983 to 7.0 in 2000, we cannot exactly

celebrate because in the same time frame, the US ranking against other

developed nations worsened dramatically, from 17th in 1983, to 28th in 2000

in spite of the fact that our health cost per capita has always been

highest and still increasing. SIDS is our 3rd most common cause of infant

death.

Policy and practice for reducing child morbidity and mortality are often

driven by maternal and child nutrition initiatives in the developing world.

This link needs attention in the United States. We cannot say that we do

not have child nutrition problems – indeed, we now have staggering problems

that were unthinkable in the late 1980s, when I was studying health policy

and program goals for the year 2000. The dismal outcomes include a tripling

of childhood obesity and a 104% increase in juvenile diabetes since 1980.

Life-threatening food allergies have doubled and we have seen a six fold

increase in the prevalence of allergies in the last decade. Childhood

asthma has increased 75% and nutrient deficiencies, not seen in decades in

US children are again prevalent.

1 in 10 children carries an attention deficit designation or diagnosis and

last but not least, 1 in 150 children has autism.

I rarely heard of autism during my studies, but now I am contacted weekly

by other nutrition professionals, not to mention a steady stream of

afflicted families, asking me how to provide therapeutic diets for these

children. This has quite sadly been my specialization since 1999, or 1996

if you count the time I spent cutting my teeth providing this for my own

child. The silver lining here is that therapeutic diets can work very well

for these children. True to the science that drives maternal and child

health programs for WHO, UNICEF, WIC, School Lunch, or Head Start -

children with autism, like any children – require normal nutrition status

to grow and develop as typically as possible.

Peer review is growing to corroborate my clinical experience: Children with

autism are not usually in normal nutrition status. Though they may grow

(and they often do not grow typically), they show multiple signs of

nutritional failure and compromise. This is what I fix in my obscure

practice, and these children begin to recover. Usually, they also need a

skilled gastroenterologist to resolve things like impactions, florid gut

inflammation, lymphoid hyperplasia, pancreatic insufficiency, and so on. It

is worrisome that pediatric providers skilled with these problems are few

and far between.

My experience and training has perched me at a cross roads between

vaccination policy and nutrition practice. We need research into the

following possibilities, because the answers may dramatically reduce infant

and child morbidity and mortality in the United States: Vaccines as we dose

them today may create nutritional failure by inflicting early and severe

injury to gut tissue and digestive function, by increasing the risk for

bilirubin neurotoxicity at birth, by setting off inflammatory responses

that consume nutrient stores, or secondarily via brain injuries that impair

feeding skill and gut motility.

If vaccines can trigger food allergies in children, this too creates a

large and costly burden: Children with food allergies have significantly

lower height for age and poor intakes of essential nutrients compared to

kids without food allergy; that is, they don’t grow as well as allergy-free

peers, can not learn as well when malnourished, and may be sick more often.

Additional educational services for these cases will further strain a

system already collapsing under the burden of record numbers of children

with autism.

Biased that vaccine injuries exist only as extremely rare, severe

anaphylactic events, and lacking skill to recognize nutrition failures in

children, pediatricians are least equipped to help the burgeoning

generation of sick children they are arguably creating. I have observed

hundreds of children who present with the same nutrition problems again and

again, and whose pediatricians were none the wiser. I had never encountered

problems like these in my training. I do believe these children are vaccine

injured. The injuries are physically pervasive, affecting immune function,

neurological signs, digestion, and absorption, such that these children do

not develop in normal nutrition status. Their brains do not get to develop

typically. The pattern of physical and developmental demise is the same

again and again relative to exposure to vaccines.

Having followed this issue for many years, I am aware of the evidence set

forth to refute the claim that vaccines are injurious on a staggering

scale, or causing autism. Many argue that these studies are massaged to

cover the horrible possibility. None of it has changed my mind, just as I

am likely not opening yours right now. We can agree to disagree, but there

is no refuting the status of child health in the United States today. For

the first time in US history, children are more vaccinated - and sicker -

than ever before. On balance, the diseases our children have are no longer

infectious, but chronic and incurable. Is this a good swap? Is it better to

get wild type chicken pox, or to be autistic for life? What do I tell the

parents of the three year old boy who entered my practice last week with a

case of shingles that quickly followed Varicella vaccination, and a new PDD

diagnosis? Should I boldly presume this is only temporal - again?

Our infants die more often than those in less developed locales the world

over. This plus our humiliating mudslide of poor child health has taken

place under the IOM’s blessing for more, more, and more pediatric vaccines

– mercury containing ones no less. Clearly, at this point, vaccination is

not making our children healthier.

Is it scientifically reasonable to deny any link, or to believe that all

these vaccinations are truly benign? Massachusetts has a program called

REACH to eradicate over-use of antibiotics. Is it possible to over-use

vaccines? Should I suggest this to the mother whose five year old autistic

son – a Make-A-Wish Foundation recipient – was referred to me to resolve

growth failure? He received first MMR at 12 months, and another dose,

mistakenly, at 15 months, rather than at age 4. The second dose nearly

killed him; he never recovered developmentally. His digestive and immune

systems were addled to the core and he had only months to live. Where will

it be noted, for IOM’s awareness, that this child’s death was caused by

over-vaccination, or that health care resources across Boston’s finest

hospitals were wasted in a vain attempt to repair what a single, redundant,

ill-timed dose of MMR had done? If hundreds of children like this cross my

remote threshold, how many other thousands upon thousands of them exist

nationwide? Comparing measles mortality to this case seems frivolous and

pointless. Healthy children in good nutrition status typically survived

measles prior to vaccine availability. I acknowledge the rate of

complication and death for wild type measles in healthy US children; I do

not acknowledge that this exceeds morbidity and mortality now caused by

over-using this and other vaccines.

I must highlight here one of the new problems demonstrated in our most

recent NHANES data: Poor vitamin A status in an alarming number of US

children despite no changes in food supply. This occurred concomitantly

with introduction of MMR vaccination and increase in vaccines/child. As you

know, measles infection depletes vitamin A stores, and this is a nutrient

with documented efficacy, prophylactically and therapeutically, against

measles infection. Is overuse of viral vaccines like MMR related to vitamin

A depletion in US children? Children with poor vitamin A status have

elevated risk overall for infection, as well as more complications with

infection. This is where realities of child nutrition clash with vaccine

policy, and no one seems to be paying attention.

There are many, many inadequately studied facets of vaccine effects, yet we

see our IOM agreeable to adding more and more vaccine doses to children.

Mercury is but one concern. The fact that individuals vary with respect to

kinetics for its excretion should be just as acceptable to your peers as it

is that individuals vary with rates for metabolizing any drug or excreting

any toxin. Fifty years ago, we knew that pregnant women who experience

certain viral exposures could produce children with autism. Why is it so

challenging then to grasp that multiple neonatal or early infant viral

exposures via vaccination could trigger the same outcome?

A link between multiple live viral exposures and increased risk of

inflammatory bowel disease was reported over a decade ago in certain

population subgroups. The findings that multiple vaccine-sourced viral

exposures delivered in quick succession, such as is done today in infants

and toddlers, may trigger inflammatory bowel disease with subsequent

developmental injury must be explored, not ignored.

My appeal is made on behalf of the hundreds of children and families I have

had the privilege to serve in my obscure corner. I should not have this job

– I do believe I would be out of work were it not for current immunization

policy and practice. Please reconvene the Immunization Safety Review

Committee with impartial experts free of allegiance to pharmaceutical

companies, who have no fear of the scientific process no matter what it

reveals, and who can accurately review independent data on vaccines, autism

spectrum diagnoses, bowel disease, allergy, diabetes, asthma, SIDS, and

child nutrition status.

On balance, vaccines may now cause more death, disease, and disability than

they prevent in US children. Reform is urgently needed. I encourage the

Vaccine Safety Committee to consider, without bias or fear, the careful

research efforts your colleagues are making to truthfully resolve this

tragic controversy.

Sincerely

Judy Converse, MPH, RD, LD

--------------------------------------------------------

Sheri Nakken, R.N., MA, Hahnemannian Homeopath

Vaccination Information & Choice Network, Nevada City CA & Wales UK

Vaccines - http://www.nccn.net/~wwithin/vaccine.htm