To those of you who’ve been asking {ahem…Kimbrah…}, yes, I really do intend to carry on with the Childhood Illnesses Up Close series. I took some time off, I suppose, because I was tired of researching disease. If you are interested, you can read about tetanus, poliomyelitis, diphtheria, pertussis, and HIB {which is really the cause of some cases of pneumonia, meningitis, and other illnesses}.
Upcoming in the next month or so will be chicken pox, measles, mumps, and rubella. It’ll be quite the roundup, I suppose. A rash of posts.
Bad pun.
Anyhow, I’ve been reading a wonderful new book, a book I would highly suggest to any parent out there {like me} who has children with autistm, asthma, ADHD, or allergies, even cerebral {neurological} allergies like my son’s:
Healing the New Childhood Epidemics:
Autism, ADHD, Asthma, and Allergies:
The Groundbreaking Program for the 4-A Disorders
I expected a lot out of this book, and I haven’t been disappointed yet. Tonight, however, I read a few pieces of information on the HIB vaccine that, frankly, surprised me. I had not learned this in my initial research. Here are a couple quotes from the book:
Several studies that had just been completed strongly implicated the HIB vaccination as one cause of juvenile-onset, or Type-I, diabetes. That is the type of the disease that is not triggered by obesity, but by a failure of the pancreas to produce enough insulin. Anju found, in fact, that the risk of children developing diabetes after receiving the HIB vaccination was even higher than the risk of their developing the disease itself, which can usually be effectively treated with a course of antibiotics. Studies indicated that the HIB vaccination may cause approximately two thousand to four thousand new cases of Type 1 diabetes every year. Advocates of the HIB vaccine dispute this perspective. However, doubts about the HIB vaccine may account for the fact that approximately one in every twenty pediatricians now refuses to give the vaccination to his or her own children. {p. 133}
The most fascinating point there? Let me restate it. It is more likely that a child will get diabetes from the HIB vaccine than that, remaining unvaccinated, he will actually become seriously ill from the bacteria itself.
Interesting.
But apparently the diabetes issue might go beyond the HIB vaccine:
In one study, conducted in New Zealand, researchers documented a 60 percent increase in Type 1 diabetes in children that began in 1998, when the country began vaccinating children for hepatitis B. A similar study in Finland showed a 64 percent increase in Type 1 diabetes that began when the HIB vaccination was introduced.
Researchers in America have linked the aluminum that is added to vaccinations to the rise in incidence of Type 1 diabetes that has occured among American children. {p. 173}
So…why not do my own research? Well, I did. But just a little. I headed over to PubMed to check around, and I found a very interested report. It’s from a 1999 British Medical Journal:
We initiated and funded a collaborative study with Tuomilehto on the effect of the Haemophilus influenzae type b vaccine on type 1 diabetes and found that the data support a causal relation {paper submitted for publication}. Furthermore, the potential risk of the vaccine exceeds the potential benefit.
Now, our family does not to make these sorts of decisions based on pragmatism, but I can’t say that isn’t interesting.
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