From ER Nursey:
The baby was 9 months old, his birth weight was 8 lbs 5 ounces. At six months he weighed just shy of 20 pounds. Today he weighed 15 pounds - he was a skeleton and he was dying.
Mom had brought him in after treatment by his naturopath had failed. Constant coughing had made it impossible for him to take in adequate nutrition and starvation, coupled with a raging bacterial pneumonia were conspiring to shortly end his very short life.
We worked feverishly. Intubation, IV boluses, major antibiotics, vasopressors. All futile.
At 9:03 pm, after 30 minutes of cardiopulmonary resuscitation we pronounced him dead.
This boy had pertussis. His mother choose not to vaccinate him. I won't enter that debate. Anyone who has ever watched a child die or become permanently disabled from a preventable illness supports vaccination.
19 comments:
That's such a touchy subject. How much liability do parents have in this child's death? I am always saddened by reports of such outrageous behavior.
Unfortunately, gdad, just as you can grow your own incest victims and abuse them--parents will skate on this issue too.
I favour a high-velocity intrathecal lead injection, personally.
William the Coroner
William tC,
I concur. Can we make sure the lead is appropriately recycled so it doesn't poison the water or whatever?
-GDad
Our former Chiropractor's wife nearly lost a leg to an infection because she didn't want to take the antibiotics.
I just don't get it.
(And yes... we vaccinated our daughter completely...) ;)
On the other hand, there have been a spate of drug recalls (Vioxx and Rotashield come to mind) that were due to nasty side effects that the drug manufacturers were not exactly swift in revealing. The public perception that profits matter more than safety to the drug companies makes some people think it's safer to take their chances with the disease than get vaccinated.
Playing Russian roulette like this with your kid's health is not the brightest approach, but doing the research in the VAERS database and searching through reputable medical journals isn't exactly easy for Joe Average either.
MJ (sorry this is anonymous, but I don't have IDs in any of your supported options)
Ugh. But I don't think most anti-vaxers are hippies. For one thing, most hippies are way too old to be having kids now.
Nope, I think the anti-vaxers are mostly people who look pretty darned conventional, and who think they're pretty mainstream.
I had pertussis as a kid (third grade), even though I'd been vaccinated for it. I was one of the lucky few who get it anyway.
It's a disease I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. I was out of school for months and it took over a year to really get healthy again.
My current doctor had never met anyone who had it.
It has been too long since polio, measles and rubella outbreaks were responsible for maiming and killing children in communities. The general population has lost the memory of the paralyzing effects of polio, the blindness and deafness caused by measles and rubella, that could sweep through a small town in a matter of weeks. It used to be a Public Health issue, now it's a personal choice. Sometimes it seems like we're moving backward as a country, not forward.
As horrible as it is that a non-vaccinated child dies of a preventable illness, the decline of herd immunity is even more upsetting. When someone's un-immunized child comes to school with Rubella and causes birth defects in his/her teacher's unborn child (despite the teacher's childhood vaccination), I hope they go to jail. Etc.
Of course, I had horrible back pain throughout my second trimester and it was only when I couldn't walk two days before flying to a job interview that I tried a chiropractor in desperation. I honestly have felt fine since the first adjustment. I wouldn't use it as an *alternative* to modern medicines, but I am definitely a convert for back pain.
Thanks for pointing me to ER Nursey.
Here are my two posts on the Silence the Sound of Pertussis campaign:
Why Vaccinate? and PKids' Campaign: Silence the Sound of Pertussis. I'm keeping a list of bloggers contributing to the campaign there; I've added your blog to the list.
Two things to know:
The immunity given by vaccination in infancy wanes after about 10 years. The CDC recommends that teens receive a booster, in the form of Tetanus-diphtheria-acellular pertussis vaccine (Tdap).
Did you know that a person with pertussis is contagious long before the cough develops?
From Pertussis.com.
Young infants are at highest risk for pertussis-related complications, including seizures, encephalopathy (swelling of the brain), otitis media (severe ear infection), anorexia (severe restriction of food intake) and dehydration.
Pneumonia is the most common complication and cause of infant pertussis-related deaths.
Whooping cough can be life-threatening for infants who are not fully vaccinated. In fact, over the last decade, 80 percent of whooping cough deaths occurred in infants under 6 months of age.
In adolescents and adults, whooping cough can cause severe coughing that can make it hard to breathe, eat, or sleep, and can result in cracked ribs, pneumonia, or hospitalization.
Here's an adult's description of her recent bout with pertussis
Here in Europe we have something even sicker - parents (usually Waldorf parents, who do not vaccinate their kids and believe that suffering from such an illness builds character) actually celebrate *measles parties* when a child comes down with measles, so that the other kids can catch it, too!!
I had a foster child from one of these people, she was not vaccinated. We had a six-week bout of whooping cough. My son is vaccinated against everything except ovarian cancer, I think I can pass on that one....
"The general population has lost the memory of the paralyzing effects of polio, the blindness and deafness caused by measles and rubella, that could sweep through a small town in a matter of weeks."
Even worse, stupider anti-vaxxers actually claim that vaccination is no longer necessary because no one gets those vaccine preventable diseases anymore. Somehow the circularity of that logic escapes them. I wonder if they decide they never need to eat again immediately after dinner, too.
You may consider the HPV vaccine for a son as well as a daughter. It would be the same argument as vaccinating him against rubella to save the unborn child of his teacher. He won't get cervical cancer, but his genital warts will give it to someone else . . .
It is not just those who you characterize as "hippies"... it is also the other end of the spectrum. Like Phyllis Schlafly and her cronies:
http://www.ratbags.com/rsoles/comment/eagleforum.htm
One of her sons is the legal counsel for AAPS, a political group pretending to be a medical one. Their journal publishes all sorts of questionable anti-vax articles:
http://neurodiversity.com/weblog/article/91/
Much more fun articles by PalMD (who is now posting at Scienceblogs):
http://whitecoatunderground.com/?s=schlafly
You'll love the bit about AAPS and their attitude towards shaking babies to death:
http://whitecoatunderground.com/2008/01/14/i-am-disgusted/
Stupidity is not limited to one side of a political fence.
Well, I am one of those moms. We researched all of the vaccines and decided to put off some until the kids were older, not get a couple, and get the most important ones. Then our eldest got her first round of shots at six weeks--horrible reaction. She stopped sleeping for days, screamed by the hour, got a really high fever and rash all over her body, and it was all we could do to keep her comfortable. This happened with every round of shots. Same thing with our son. Now that they're older, they only get mild fevers and rashes and only have trouble sleeping for one night, but it's still not easy. They're up on everything now except the Hep B, which we're putting off until they're 10 and doing with Hep A at the same time.
Everyone in the medical field said you didn't need a varicella booster. Oops, yeah, now you do (which erases the financial benefit to the vaccine, the main reason it was introduced according to several editorials in NEJM and Hubby's chief of Peds in med school). Rotoshield killed babies here when the likelihood of getting the disease and dying from it was actually lower (though it's still used in parts of the world where those numbers are reversed). Pneumovax was sold as the cure for ear infections, but several studies proved that wrong (after millions of parents paid $150 for the shot and the booster), and while it's still used on preemies and babies with asthma, it's not in the universal recommendations.
Then there are the ingredients. A few have eggs in them or use eggs to produce them (like the flu vax), and what do you do with a baby you don't know is deathly allergic to eggs? All sorts of odd proteins are in them from all sorts of animal and plant materials, in small enough amounts that some doctors theorize that's what's behind the huge upswing in allergies and asthma. Bad reactions are actually more common than many doctors realize, and severe allergic reactions happen. Some kill.
The reality is, as a parent, you're screwed if you do and screwed if you don't. If you vaccinate, your kid could still get it or get a bad reaction that can even put him/her in the hospital. If you don't, your kid could get it and even end up in the hospital. It's a crapshoot, and many of us are reading the latest research and doing the best we can.
Though, we always did the DTaP, mostly for the tetanus, since that scares me. I didn't get my booster last fall (forgot), and I got pertussis this winter and broke a rib with the coughing, so I'm glad my kids had the shot and never got it. Pertussis and tetanus are serious, scary diseases.
Carina, I think your confidence exceeds your knowledge on this subject.
"We researched all the vaccines"
This is the first clue that you're dealing with someone who thinks he or she is smarter than the entire Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices put together.
"They're up on everything now except the Hep B, which we're putting off until they're 10"
You're leaving them vulnerable during time when hepatitis B is most dangerous to them. It's if they get it as infants that they face a 90% chance of chronic infection with accompanying high risk of cirrhosis and liver cancer. There's a reason vaccines are scheduled when they are.
"erases the financial benefit to the vaccine"
And this concerns you more than the possibility that your child could be made miserable by varicella and possibly pass the infection to an infant or adult who would be at higher risk of serious complications or death?
"Rotoshield killed babies here"
Rotashield was linked to one death. Statistically speaking, the doses that were delivered can be expected to have prevented more than that. The two rotavirus vaccines in current use do not introduce this concern.
"Pneumovax was sold as the cure for ear infections"
This was one of the possible benefits of Prevnar (Pneumovax is something else, it's for the elderly) but the main concern was prevention of pneumococcal pneumonia, meningitis, and sepsis. Which it prevents very nicely. And it is recommended for all children at 2, 4, 6, and 12-15 months.
"A few have eggs in them"
Just influenza vaccine, actually. I am unaware of any child who has suffered a serious reaction because of this.
"All sorts of odd proteins are in them from all sorts of animal and plant materials"
Unlike our natural world, do you suppose?
Vaccines don't have ingredients thrown in at random. If it's there, it serves a function, and they are tested more extensively than pretty much any other medical product.
"some doctors theorize that's what's behind the huge upswing in allergies and asthma"
Some of the same doctors also blame vaccines for SIDS, diabetes, and ADHD.
All this said, I'm glad to read that you realize vaccine-preventable diseases are dangerous. There are plenty of things worth tying yourself in knots about, but this isn't one of them.
Gee, thanks, I didn't know that my hubby's MD meant he could never read research and make decisions for his own kids, talk with other doctors and read journals and figure out what's best for his own kids. Just for his patients? I didn't do all of the research--my husband went over everything I found, talked with the Chief of Peds at Rainbow Children's about the Hep B and some of our concerns, and did some of his own reading on the topic. He never would've gone along with me if he thought our kids would've been in any kind of danger or would've put anyone around us in danger.
One of the things that really gets to me on this topic is the assumption that parents who read up on it and look into it are stupid and the doctors know everything. I had a doctor tell me to give my daughter Prevnar (you're right--I got them mixed up) to prevent ear infections (what the drug reps were telling everyone). I gave her a copy of the NEJM article that disproved that theory, and she told me I was an idiot and didn't know how to read a medical study. Since I have helped my husband study from pre-med on, I thought that was a bunch of bunk. It was a large double-blind study, and the recommendations were changed not long after that, based on the study, but I was an idiot because I didn't have MD after my name.
Look, I agree that some of the anti-vaccine material out there is bunk. I also think, however, that we should be more careful. Humans didn't evolve to handle those kinds of substances put into the bloodstream on the first day of life, and while, granted, we used to lose far more children than now, we should really look at the VAERS results and see if there are better, safer ways to protect our kids. How could more research be wrong?
Been there, done that. Horrible, horrible death for a baby. I think it should be illegal to refuse to vaccinate. I really do. We legislate car seats- there's no "religious exemption" that allows parents to "chose what's best" and let the baby crash through the windshield or be crushed by the adult holding them during a car accident. So, why do we let people "choose what's best" and have their child choke to death from pertussis and diphtheria, become blind or brain damaged from measles, or any of the other preventable harm caused by non vaccination.
The one that always really cracks me up is the parents who say "but those diseases are no longer common". Right, because I took the minuscule risk from vaccinating my child because it was the right thing to do, not only for my child, but for society as a whole.
As for more research, go ahead. Let them research on your child. Oh, wait, that would be taking a risk for the good of the society, and you've already shown that you won't do that.
Mother Nature is a cold, hard bitch. Check the number of tiny headstones in any historic cemetery for confirmation.
If we're going to deal in the world of anecdotes, here's mine. I was born in 1962, and my dad's job took us to Southeast Asia when I was a wee thing. Southeast Asia being full of all sorts of communicable diseases, I was immunized for just about everything you can imagine. On top of the standard U.S. immunization schedule, I got vaccinations for rabies, yellow fever, typhoid, and other stuff I can't even remember. Pills for malaria too, and the rabies booster series on more than one occasion because the Army doctors would give you the 5-shot booster series if an animal even looked at you funny in Bangkok. My childhood vaccination record (which my mom still has somewhere) is chock-full of things. And guess what? No adverse reactions, no autism, no problems.
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