Re: Vaccine Schedule???

[Guest guest]

Running out to see Click so hope the following archive of archives

on this not at all new subject will help:

Re: opting out of vaccinations

and all,

I don't think the world is black and white -all or nothing. I

also learned that following my gut is good -but hindsight

proves to be better in some cases. The best advice is to stay

informed on all sides. If you read something that upsets you

because you disagree with it, try to understand where it came from

and you may learn from it. For example Dr. Gordon may have a great

alternative -later and slower instead of never:

" Vaccinations Today

by Dr. Jay Gordon

In my office, with families I know well, I believe that the main idea

I convey is that we should vaccinate later and slower. One shot at a

visit starting later in the first year and perhaps in the second year

of life. "

http://www.drjaygordon.com/pediatricks/vacctoday.htm

Also as I state below:

" This subject is one that has come up before -and will come up again.

As I posted once before -my sister in law who is a chemist for

and is friends with many medical professionals and

one of them had a child that regressed immediately after his shots

and developed autism. Based on that -as well as from looking into

vaccines further with all the doubts raised here from other concerned

parents -this educated and intelligent caring couple decided not to

vaccinate their second child at all believing their children to be at

risk for some reason. The second son -without any vaccines at all -

developed autism as well ...and has autism much more severe than the

first. If anyone needs the name and number of this family just email

me -they are from NJ so some of you may know them. "

I'm not sure if any of you read the awesome book 'the five people

you meet in heaven' but when Eddie is meeting the second person in

heaven the one quote said to learn from is " I got all those shots

for all those diseases and I died here anyhow, healthy as a horse. "

Vaccinations may not be the only problem, and probably isn't. And

they have

saved lives too. Just stay informed of pros and cons.

The following is long - but if this topic interests you it may be

something you'll want to read..if not just delete:

From: " kiddietalk " <kiddietalk@...>

Date: Thu Nov 14, 2002 8:34 am

Subject: New York Times article for the " Not-So-Crackpots "

Hey! Did Arthur write this article because I said we aren't

nutballs?!!

" In my opinion I do not believe the way to deal with this topic is

to even fall into the joking trap of saying we are " nuts "

or " nutballs " -we are concerned parents and most pediatricians are

parents too. "

/message/14122

(posted below too)

Remember that post from not to long ago about my 11 month son

Tanner's 3rd Hep B shot in 1997, before the thimerosal - a mercury

derivative, was taken out (it's out now)- right before the 2 weeks

of high fevers when Tanner regressed and developed all the parent

friendly signs of neurodevelopmental damage that we and the regular

pediatrician didn't pick up, lost sounds, including " da " and all

that was left was " ma " and " mmmmm " ...

They call it autism in this article -it's more conditions than just

that on the rise. My child is not autistic.

For the new people -I too was like you- and no I didn't spend any

time worrying about what caused Tanner's apraxia for the past three

and a half years at all which you can clearly see in the archives, I

just wanted to know how to help Tanner to talk and be OK again. Now

that Tanner's doing so much better and yet my husband and I wonder

if he will ever be 100% up to speed, and now that I am informed

about all that is written below, I have thought about it.

Thanks (who runs UK support) for sending this to me! And

thanks Sallie Bernard -for forming Safe Minds referred to in this

article -and being a hero to so many children. Because of you and

those that worked with you -you gave children now a chance to

develop without thimerosal in their injections. Mercury is nasty -

now if we can only clean up our world to get it out of all the food

we eat and water we drink.

~

November 10, 2002

The Not-So-Crackpot Autism Theory

By ARTHUR ALLEN

eal Halsey's life was dedicated to promoting vaccination. In June

1999, the s Hopkins pediatrician and scholar had completed a

decade of service on the influential committees that decide which

inoculations will be jabbed into the arms and thighs and buttocks of

eight million American children each year. At the urging of Halsey

and others, the number of vaccines mandated for children under 2 in

the 90's soared to 20, from 8. Kids were healthier for it, according

to him. These simple, safe injections against hepatitis B and germs

like haemophilus bacteria would help thousands grow up free of

diseases like meningitis and liver cancer.

Halsey's view, however, was not shared by a small but vocal faction

of parents who questioned whether all these shots did more harm than

good. While many of the childhood infections that vaccines were

designed to prevent -- among them diphtheria, mumps, chickenpox and

polio -- seemed to be either antique or innocuous, serious chronic

diseases like asthma, juvenile diabetes and autism were on the rise.

And on the Internet, especially, a growing number of self-styled

health activists blamed vaccines for these increases.

Like all medical interventions, vaccines sometimes cause adverse

reactions. But unlike pills, vaccines come packaged with high

expectations, which make them particularly vulnerable to public

criticism. Vaccines don't cure people, and they are administered to

healthy children, which gives them few opportunities for good press.

When they work, nothing happens. When vaccinated children become

ill, their parents are grief-stricken and often enraged, even if

vaccines aren't proved to be at fault. All of this puts public-

health advocates like Halsey on the defensive. Most attacks on

vaccines, they say, are based on hysteria, bad science and dubious

politics.

Halsey, 57, has green eyes, a white beard that makes him look like a

ship's captain and an air of careful authority. As chairman of the

American Academy of Pediatrics committee on infectious diseases from

1995 through June 1999, he often appeared in the media administering

calm reassurance. ''Many of the allegations against vaccines,''

Halsey said in one interview, ''are based on unproven hypotheses and

causal associations with little evidence.''

And then suddenly in June 1999, during a visit to the Food and Drug

Administration, a squall appeared on the horizon of Halsey's

confidence. Halsey attended a meeting to discuss thimerosal, a

mercury-containing preservative that at the time was being used in

several vaccines -- including the hepatitis B shot that Halsey had

fought so hard to have administered to American babies. By the time

the dust kicked up in that meeting had settled, Halsey would be

forced to reckon with the hypothesis that thimerosal had damaged the

brains of immunized infants and may have contributed to the

unexplained explosion in the number of cases of autism being

diagnosed in children.

That Halsey was willing even to entertain this possibility enraged

some of his fellow vaccinologists, who couldn't fathom how a doctor

who had spent so much energy dismantling the arguments of people who

attacked vaccines could now be changing sides. But to Halsey's mind,

his actions were perfectly consistent: he was simply working from

the data. And the numbers deeply troubled him. ''From the beginning,

I saw thimerosal as something different,'' he says. ''It was the

first strong evidence of a causal association with neurological

impairment. I was very concerned.''

The investigation into mercury vaccines was instigated in 1997 by

Representative Pallone Jr., a New Jersey Democrat whose

district includes a string of shore towns where mercury in fish is

one of many environmental concerns. Pallone, who had been pressing

the government to re-evaluate its overall guidelines on mercury

toxicity, attached an amendment to an F.D.A. bill requiring the

agency to inventory all mercury contained in licensed drugs and

vaccines.

The job of adding up the amount of mercury in vaccines and assessing

its risk fell to Ball, an F.D.A. scientist, and two F.D.A.

pediatricians, Ball, 's wife, and R. Pratt.

Thimerosal, which is 50 percent ethyl mercury by weight, had been

used as a vaccine preservative since the 1930's in the diphtheria-

tetanus-pertussis shot, known as D.T.P., and it was later added to

some vaccines for hepatitis B and haemophilus bacteria, which by the

early 1990's had become routine immunizations for infants.

The F.D.A. team's conclusions were frightening. Vaccines added under

Halsey's watch had tripled the dose of mercury that infants got in

their first few months of life. As many as 30 million American

children may have been exposed to mercury in excess of Environmental

Protection Agency guidelines -- levels of mercury that, in theory,

could have killed enough brain cells to scramble thinking or hex

behavior.

''My first reaction was simply disbelief, which was the reaction of

almost everybody involved in vaccines,'' Halsey says. ''In most

vaccine containers, thimerosal is listed as a mercury derivative, a

hundredth of a percent. And what I believed, and what everybody else

believed, was that it was truly a trace, a biologically

insignificant amount. My honest belief is that if the labels had had

the mercury content in micrograms, this would have been uncovered

years ago. But the fact is, no one did the calculation.''

Making matters worse, the latest science on mercury damage suggested

that even small amounts of organic mercury could do harm to the

fetal brain. Some of the federal safety guidelines on mercury were

relaxed in the 90's, even as the amount of mercury that children

received in vaccines increased. The more Halsey learned about these

mercury studies, the more he worried.

''My first concern was that it would harm the credibility of the

immunization program,'' he says. ''But gradually it came home to me

that maybe there was some real risk to the children.'' Mercury was

turning out to be like lead, which had been studied extensively in

the homes of the Baltimore poor during Halsey's tenure at

Hopkins. ''As they got more sophisticated at testing for lead, the

safe level marched down and down, and they continued to find subtle

neurological impairment,'' Halsey says. ''And that's almost exactly

what happened with mercury.''

Halsey was beginning to think that it would be prudent to limit

thimerosal-containing vaccines and urge pediatricians to use

thimerosal-free shots when possible. But his decision inflamed some

of his peers. After all, although the thimerosal data was worrisome

to Halsey, the available science offered no clear proof that the

preservative posed a genuine danger to children when given in parts

per million. Moreover, it wasn't clear that there were enough

thimerosal-free vaccines available for diseases like pertussis and

hepatitis B. Should an unproven fear justify the cessation of a

procedure that protected children from proven dangers?

Halsey looked into the matter further and found only complexity. In

the medical literature, most cases of acute mercury poisoning result

from doses hundreds or thousands of times higher than what infants

received with thimerosal-laden vaccines. And although the thimerosal

levels in vaccines exceeded the E.P.A.'s guidelines for methyl

mercury, thimerosal contained ethyl mercury, a compound that behaves

somewhat differently in the body. The E.P.A. based its guidelines on

a series of studies of 917 children born in 1987 in the Faeroe

Islands, a windswept North Atlantic archipelago, to women who ate

methyl-mercury-tainted whale meat. The Faeroes children, whose

umbilical cord blood averaged four times the E.P.A.'s daily ''safe''

dose -- which was 0.1 micrograms per kilo -- exhibited small but

measurable neurological deficits seven years later. They had slower

reaction times and diminished attention spans and their word choice

and memorization were less keen than those of their classmates who

had been exposed to less mercury, according to Philippe Grandjean, a

Danish researcher who leads the continuing Faeroes study and teaches

at Boston University.

During most of the 90's, many American 6-month-olds received a total

of 187.5 micrograms of ethyl mercury through vaccination. While the

Faeroes children were exposed to mercury as developing fetuses, and

therefore were more vulnerable than the vaccinated American infants,

the American babies included about 60,000 each year who had already

been exposed to high mercury levels because their mothers had eaten

a lot of contaminated fish. What's more, hundreds of thousands of Rh-

negative pregnant women and their unborn Rh-positive babies received

additional thimerosal each year through injections designed to keep

the mothers' immune systems from attacking the fetuses.

The Faeroes studies, though they dealt with methyl mercury, unnerved

Halsey. Other researchers were troubled, too. Lucier, a

toxicologist who led a 1998 White House review of mercury's dangers,

went so far as to say it was ''very likely'' that thimerosal had

damaged some children. There was precious little data to back up

that precise suspicion -- and little to dismiss it -- because of the

lack of toxicology research on ethyl mercury.

On July 7, 1999, at Halsey's urging, the American Academy of

Pediatrics and the Public Health Service released a statement urging

vaccine manufacturers to remove thimerosal as quickly as possible

and advising pediatricians to postpone giving most newborns the

birth dose of the hepatitis B vaccine. The decision, which helped to

create vaccine shortages and led some babies to become infected with

hepatitis B, outraged some senior vaccine experts. Walter Orenstein,

director of the National Immunization Program at the Centers for

Disease Control and Prevention, would charge that the rush to remove

thimerosal-containing vaccines was ''precipitous.'' Stanley Plotkin,

a renowned vaccine developer, said that it was fruitless to try to

soothe vaccination critics. ''If antivaccinationists did not have

mercury, they would have another issue,'' he said at one

meeting. ''One cannot prevent them from making hay regardless of

whether the sun is shining or not.''

In Halsey's view, however, thimerosal wasn't simply a bone for rabid

vaccine opponents to gnaw on. In the middle of that hectic summer he

took a vacation in Maine. Canoeing on a lake, he came across posters

that advised fishermen to ''protect your children -- release your

catch.'' Halsey took that message to heart. If the government was

warning people against eating fish with mercury, he asked his

colleagues, ''does it make sense to allow it to be injected into

infants?''

Although other vaccinologists criticized Halsey, many of his

colleagues rallied around him. ''Neal put kids ahead of the

vaccination program, which was gutsy,'' says Lynn Goldman, a former

E.P.A. official who has been on the Hopkins faculty since 1999 and

worked with Halsey on thimerosal. ''It would have been easier for

him to line up on the other side.''

Few scientists believe that the spike in autism could have been

caused solely by the thimerosal in vaccines, but in October 2001, a

vaccine-safety committee at the starchy Institute of Medicine

confirmed that it was ''biologically plausible'' -- though by no

means proved -- that thimerosal could be related to

neurodevelopmental delays in some children. The committee

recommended that thimerosal be removed from vaccines and called for

extensive research to determine any damage it had caused.

alsey's fellow researchers were right about one thing. Antivaccine

advocates immediately seized upon the thimerosal theory, and Halsey

became something of an unwilling hero to the vaccine-safety

advocates with whom he had so often sparred. In fact, thousands of

parents with autistic children have responded to the Institute of

Medicine report by filing lawsuits. , who has won

millions in toxic tort settlements from pharmaceutical companies,

was among the first lawyers to sue vaccine manufacturers, on behalf

of Mead, a 4-year-old Portland, Ore., boy with autism.

also filed a separate class-action lawsuit with 's

healthy older sister, Eleanor, as lead plaintiff, demanding that

vaccine makers also pay for studies to determine thimerosal's

effects on millions of children who might have lower I.Q.'s or other

less obvious signs of mercury poisoning. Past studies have shown

that mercury's effects vary tremendously from person to person,

presumably because of genetic differences in the body's capacity to

protect delicate organs from it.

''In order to win the Eleanor lawsuit you need to establish

liability, but I don't think that is going to be that hard,''

said in a recent chat in his Portland office. ''Organic

mercury is a very serious neurotoxin.''

embodies the vaccine establishment's worst fear about

Halsey's course of action -- which is that taking the precautionary

step of eliminating thimerosal would be read as an admission of

fault. ''The agenda was set by the lawyers and the antivaccine

activists,'' a source close to a number of manufacturers complained

to me. ''The scientists responded to it scientifically, and that put

them behind the eight ball right away. You had Neal Halsey running

around saying: 'We've got to do something! We've got to show we're

concerned!'''

Offit, a vaccinologist at the Children's Hospital of

Philadelphia, takes it a step further. ''In some instances I think

full disclosure can be harmful,'' he says. ''Is it safe to say there

is zero risk with thimerosal, when it is remotely possible that one

child would get sick? Well, since we say that mercury is a

neurotoxin, we have to do everything we can to get rid of it. But I

would argue that removing thimerosal didn't make vaccines safer --

it only made them perceptibly safer.''

For Halsey, thimerosal injury is a possibility that must be

addressed -- but by science, not by the courts. The scientific

agenda, however, is already deeply politicized. From the start, the

C.D.C.'s efforts to examine the possibility of thimerosal damage

became snarled in acrimony. Critics of the vaccination system don't

trust the C.D.C., which monitors evidence of adverse reactions to

vaccines through the Vaccine Safety Datalink, a computerized set of

7.5 million medical records. Safe Minds, an advocacy group of

parents who believe that their autistic children were damaged by

thimerosal, has used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain

documents showing that as early as December 1999 the C.D.C. had

reason to believe that thimerosal caused developmental delays in

some children. It was far from conclusive evidence, but vaccine

critics charged that the C.D.C. tried to play it down. One of those

critics was Dan Burton, a Republican congressman from Indiana, who

says he firmly believes that his grandson's autism is a result of

vaccines. ''I'm so ticked off about my grandson, and to think that

the public-health people have been circling the wagons to cover up

the facts!'' Burton fumed at a June hearing. ''Why, it just makes me

want to vomit!''

What comes through in an examination of the documents uncovered by

Safe Minds is less a coverup than an impression of scientists

anxiously watching over their shoulders as they work. One document,

for example, records comments made by Brent, a Philadelphia

pediatrician who served as a consultant for the thimerosal

study. ''The medical-legal findings in this study, causal or not,

are horrendous,'' Brent said. ''If an allegation was made that a

child's neurobehavioral findings were caused by thimerosal-

containing vaccines, you could readily find a junk scientist who

would support the claim with a reasonable degree of certainty. But

you will not find a scientist with any integrity who would say the

reverse with the data that is available. . . . So we are in a bad

position from the standpoint of defending any lawsuits if they were

initiated.''

More research is in the works. The C.D.C. is setting up a study of

neurodevelopmental effects based in part on the Faeroe Islands

model. The N.I.H. is financing studies of thimerosal metabolism in

animals and children. (An early University of Rochester study was

reassuring: it indicated that children eliminate thimerosal much

more quickly than expected.)

Clearly, a lot is riding on this research, and pressure is being

brought to bear on both sides. Can the vaccine authorities accept a

positive answer? Can the vaccine opponents accept a negative

one? ''No one wants to think that harm might have been done,''

Halsey says. ''I don't want to think harm might have been done.''

American children still receive up to 20 vaccines in the first two

years of life. The first symptoms of autism often appear between the

ages of 12 and 24 months. Most autism experts say that the two facts

are coincidental, but as a major California study recently

confirmed, autism is being diagnosed in numbers far higher than ever

before, suggesting that a nongenetic cause may be partly to blame.

In some children, the behavioral traits of autism present themselves

along with physical problems like sensory dysfunction and motor

disorders that have rough correlates in the mercury-poisoning

literature. For some parents, thimerosal provides a grand unifying

theory that squarely points the finger at the government and vaccine

makers.

During much of the 20th-century, children suffered from an ailment

called pink disease, which caused peeling skin on the extremities as

well as regressive behavior. In 1948, a keen-eyed Cincinnati

pediatrician named f Warkany noticed a common risk factor in

these children: they had all been given teething powders containing

calomel, a mercury derivative. Only about 1 in 500 children whose

parents gave them calomel got pink disease -- suggesting that a

constitutional vulnerability to mercury was part of the clinical

picture. Soon after the powders were taken off the market, pink

disease disappeared.

Autism is a global phenomenon that was first reported in America in

1943, long before the potential dangers of thimerosal vaccines were

raised. Removing the preservative won't -- even in the best case --

eliminate the illness. But scientists estimate that the current rate

of autism in its various forms might be as high as 1 in 500. If the

autism trend begins to recede now that thimerosal has been removed,

it could certainly suggest a cause. If it does decline, we might

have Neal Halsey to thank. If it doesn't, his colleagues in the

vaccine establishment may blame him for stoking an irrational

protest from the public.

Halsey, who still heads the Hopkins Institute for Vaccine Safety,

which he was a founder of in 1997, is on the fence. ''I don't

believe the evidence is convincing now that there has definitely

been harm done by thimerosal,'' he says, absently stroking his

balding head. But to keep the vaccine program on a steady keel,

Halsey says, the public-health authorities simply must follow

through with the studies and face the consequences without

flinching. If there is damage, he says, ''there should be some kind

of compensation, though I don't know how.'' He pauses, and

sighs. ''I empathize with families of children with these disorders.

How are you going to put dollar values on that?''

Arthur lives in Washington and is working on a history of

vaccination.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=health & res=9B03EFD7153EF933A25752\

C1A9649C8B63

=====

[Guest guest]

Martha, thank you for posting this. It's an EXCELLENT question, and

I hope one of our experts will comment! Does anyone know the name

of that Oregon doctor??

>

> For Mdautie - or anyone else out there with tips.

>

> I am investigating the vaccine link and was wondering if anyone

knows

> of a reputable resource for scheduling vaccines - ie: not the

current

> CDC schedule. I have done a few google's on the topic but frankly

am

> pressed for time and can't spend hours filtering through 100's of

> pages. I do want to vaccinate, but want to do it in the least

> potentially harmful manner. I know there was an article posted on

the

> listserv a few months ago re: a pediatric practice in Oregon that

> gives their vacs on a different schedule and they have no recorded

> autism cases for those kids.

> This has an immediate impact for me - my dd is 5 mo and has

already

> recieved her first 2 " rounds " of shots. I am doing several things

> different for her as " just in case " measures: taking fish oil

myself,

> buying organic when possible, avoiding artificial dye, etc. I know

> that none of these things are failsafe. I just want to do all that

I

> can as preventative measures, it may not change anything but I

will

> sleep better knowing I did what I could.

>

> Thanks again to all the parents/grandparents on this list who have

> been such a wealth of knowledge.

>

> Martha

>