NPR article on pertussis: "Is vaccine refusal worth the risk?"

[littlecindy]

thoughts on this one?

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...ryId=104523437

[fruitfulmomma]

Just skimmed it but ... whatever, the DTaP is contraindicated for *my* kids by the CDC. (Or it was, they have updated their website in the last few years removing some of the previous warnings.) My husband reacted to DTP and had seizures for years. Oh, and yeah he had whooping cough too, a lot.

Why don't they ask "Is Vaccine Acceptance Worth the Risk?". They admit to some "rare" but very severe reactions. We have NO clue what puts one child at risk and not another. We know that the deaths from diseases vaxxed for were on a huge decline before the vax. We know that with proper health care, hygiene, good nutrition, and clean water that the risk for contracting and dying from one of those diseases is *very* low. 140 deaths out of over 300 million people? That is less than .00005% of the population. Frankly my kids have a higher risk of dying in a wreck on the way to get the vax.

[peainthepod]

Pure propaganda with the usual weird unsourced statements. Like this one:

In fact, all scientific studies show vaccines to be highly effective and safe, with only rare, moderate, adverse side effects.

What vaccines? All vaccines or just DTaP? What about DTP before they made it acellular? What studies are they referring to, the ones that compare new vaccines to old vaccines? Because since no double-blind placebo studies have ever been done (to my knowledge), and no long-term safety studies comparing unvaxed to fully vaxed to partially vaxed to delayed vaxed children have ever been done, then you can't really say vaccines are proven safe--just that the new vaccines might cause fewer side effects than the old vaccines. By any other measure and without a huge marketing machine behind it, this is just pseudoscience, pure quackery. And can we have some links in the article, please? Sources, maybe? Or are we just supposed to take NPR's word for it? Somehow that never seems to work when anti-vax articles are posted as a reference...

If the side effects are so rare, what about VAERS? What about the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, which has awarded over a billion dollars to injured children and their families since its inception in 1986? Why do even the vaccine manufacturers admit in their package inserts that we have no idea what long-term reproductive and mutagenic problems they can cause? And so on and so on.

And this:

Pertussis in infants is often severe, and infants are more likely than older children or adults to develop complications, the most common of which is bacterial pneumonia. Rare complications include seizures, inflammation of the brain and death.

would be true, except that pertussis is by far most dangerous in infants under six months of age. By the time they reach the DTaP dose when pertussis protection supposedly kicks in, they are out of the statistical danger zone. Not to mention that seizures, brain swelling ("DTaP scream"), and death are also side effects of the pertussis vaccine.

And this:

Specifically, researchers examined the medical records of children 2 months old to 18 years old who were members of Kaiser Permanente Colorado between 1996 and 2007. First, investigators confirmed which children had pertussis infections. Next, they verified whether parents had refused some or all vaccines for their children.

Researchers found that children of parents who refused the vaccine were 23 times more likely to get whooping cough compared to fully immunized children. "A 23-fold increase is huge," says Jason Glanz, a senior scientist at Kaiser Permanente's Institute for Health Research who headed the study.

is being discussed in another thread. If pertussis is under-diagnosed because many peds and GPs refuse to consider it a possibility or test for it in vaccinated children, then just going by medical records when comparing vaxed v. unvaxed kids will hugely skew the results. Pertussis cases in vaxed kids, if diagnosed as bronchitis or a common viral infection, will not appear in medical charts.

Here's a nice strawman:

Glanz says the findings should help "dispel one of the commonly held beliefs among vaccine-refusing parents: that their children are not at risk for vaccine preventable diseases."

I know a lot of non-vaxers and I've never met anyone who believes that our children will not get vaccine-available diseases--just that the risk of vaccinating outweighs the risk of these treatable illnesses.

Not to mention that the pertussis vaccine does not prevent transmission, but (supposedly) only lessens symptoms. Thus vaccinated children can still get and pass around the infection, and are contagious to others. This totally invalidates the argument that unvaxed children are a danger to the babies who are too young to be vaccinated.

The whole article is typical of the massive disinformation campaign about vaccines one finds in the mainstream media. It would be almost funny if it didn't have such dire implications for so many innocent children.

[peainthepod]

Oh and this is just revolting:

On top of that, physicians are battling a lot of misinformation, says Glanz. The Internet, for example, is easily accessible and often misleading, with numerous scary descriptions of devastating diseases purported to result from vaccines.

All of this adds up to a critical need for the public health community to develop effective "risk communications messages" that "resonate with parents" in order to help them make truly informed decisions about vaccinating children, he says.

Translation: Parents are communicating with each other and sharing stories, putting the pieces together despite blackout campaigns by Big Pharma and their MSM lackeys. The response should not be a call for actual safety studies, but increased scare tactics, strongarming, and bullying.

Parents are wising up and the pharmaceutical industry is losing profits. Uh oh! Time to trot out the usual suspects and ramp up the fearmongering.

[oursonend]

Originally Posted by peainthepod

Oh and this is just revolting:



Translation: Parents are communicating with each other and sharing stories, putting the pieces together despite blackout campaigns by Big Pharma and their MSM lackeys. The response should not be a call for actual safety studies, but increased scare tactics, strongarming, and bullying.

Parents are wising up and the pharmaceutical industry is losing profits. Uh oh! Time to trot out the usual suspects and ramp up the fearmongering.

It's seemed very apt to me that the Swine Flu swept the media out of nowhere and within weeks there was a vaccine available and a campaign to vaccinate everyone. Yeah, right. Maybe if they had the vaccine ready before the virus came out...

Sounds like a great way to recoup losses, though.

[Mom2Mason]

Over the past 10 years, a highly contagious and sometimes fatal bacterial disease once thought to have been eradicated from the U.S. has re-emerged,

Is this true? Was pertussis ever eradicated in the US? How is this possible, given that the vaccine doesn't prevent transmission. I don't see how this could be anywhere near the truth.

[k9sarchik]

Originally Posted by Mom2Mason

Is this true? Was pertussis ever eradicated in the US? How is this possible, given that the vaccine doesn't prevent transmission. I don't see how this could be anywhere near the truth.

No it has never been eradicated. Whether there is more or less people being vaxed the # of yearly cases remains the same with it having more cases every 4-5 years. Then it cycles back down again.

[Romana]

Originally Posted by Mom2Mason

Is this true? Was pertussis ever eradicated in the US? How is this possible, given that the vaccine doesn't prevent transmission. I don't see how this could be anywhere near the truth.

The statement is simply incorrect. The pertussis vaccine is only 71% effective (approximately) and therefore could never by wiped out by vaccination, even if the vaccine prevented transmission (which it doesn't).

I had pertussis this winter. My 11 month old baby did. My almost 3 year old had a mild case. We were all fine. Yes, we were sick. Yes, it was unpleasant. However, based on the symptoms I would be surprised if it was my first case of pertussis. My case was the worst of the three by far, but the baby also got the funny cough.

Our cases were not lab-confirmed but it's almost certain based on the symptoms, and the fact that it has definitely been present in our community.

In pertussis, coughing occurs in sudden uncontrollable bursts, where one cough follows the next without a break for breath. Many people make a high-pitched whooping sound when breathing in after a coughing episode, hence the nickname "whooping cough." Coughing can be so severe, patients can vomit or break ribs.

This is absolutely true and this is absolutely what it was like. None of us threw up, but I cracked/broke a rib. I think that likely happened because the baby was almost exclusively breastfed at the time and therefore I had lower bone density and was more vulnerable to cracking a rib. There was a sort of whistle when I coughed intensely and a sort of gasping sound as I breathed back in after a fit. Even though the above is an accurate description and it was unpleasant, it was still more annoying than anything else (with the exception of the cracked rib, which was a pain in the ass).

Oh . . . also . . . I'm fully vaccinated and up to date.

ETA: None of us needed the doctor for this illness, though I showed up with my cracked rib because it hurt so much.

[suschi]

"Is Vaccine Acceptance Worth the Risk?"

That's the true question, as another poster stated.

Just by the title alone, I don't have to read any further to know the gist, lies and propaganda.

And as another posted, quoted from the article, eradicated? Not even close, it's always been around, but often mis or un diagnosed. At least until there was a vaccine to sell for the older crowd....while the vaccine was in development, drs were sent communication to be on the look out for any cough lasting >2 weeks as possible pertussis, this way they could track/cite more cases making it appear it was on the rise.....and who gets blamed for the increase (aka better detection) the unvaxed. What a joke, when their own studies found that those passing the disease along were normally older family members of the affected.

[Sileree]

"Health officials cite an increase in the incidence of pertussis, particularly among infants and teenagers. In 1976, there were just over 1,000 reported cases of pertussis in the United States; by 2004, it had climbed to nearly 26,000 cases; and between 2000 and 2005, there were 140 deaths resulting from pertussis in the U.S.

At the same time, studies and anecdotal reports from doctors nationwide report an increase in the number of parents refusing to vaccinate their children against childhood diseases."

Well if pro-vax people can keep bleating "correlation does not equal causation!" then I think I get to here.

"Pertussis in infants is often severe"

No, reported cases in infants are often severe.

"The DTaP vaccine, like other routine childhood immunizations, has been shown to be more than 98 percent effective."

Bull.

[Red]

IT's so irritating. I'd hoped we (the human race) would have made more progress by now.


My oldest dd, fully immunized had Pertussis and did permanent damage to her lungs. She has what the doc calls 'exercise induced asthma'. The 4 younger ids, one vaxed, 3 not, all living together, didn't get it. THe three kids down teh road, all unvaxed, 2 of them got it and were really sick, hospitalized. (I think their poor diet had an effect) The other one never got sick.

The truth is that they're using our children for guinea pigs. They're clueless.

[fruitfulmomma]

The 4 younger ids, one vaxed, 3 not, all living together, didn't get it. THe three kids down teh road, all unvaxed, 2 of them got it and were really sick, hospitalized. (I think their poor diet had an effect) The other one never got sick.

But how can that be? The CDC tells us that all unvaccinated children will assuredly get the disease if there is an outbreak...
http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vac-gen/...aseshadalready

In a high school of 1,000 students, none has ever had measles. All but 5 of the students have had two doses of measles vaccine, and so are fully immunized. The entire student body is exposed to measles, and every susceptible student becomes infected. The 5 unvaccinated students will be infected, of course...Looking at it another way, 100% of the children who had not been vaccinated got measles, compared with less than 1% of those who had been vaccinated.

(Bolding Mine)

Their logic and hubris quite frankly astonishes me. I'd laugh if it weren't such a serious subject.

[SunshineJ]

I'll have to see if I can find the link or an old article about it, but I remember sometime since we moved back to KC (2002) hearing on the radio about a school that was shut down because such a high percentage of the children had come down with whooping cough. I remember the announcer made a point of saying that most of the children were vaccinated. I wasn't really anti-vax at the time and remember wondering at the time what the point of the vax was if an entire school came down with it. I only heard about it a few times, now I'm wondering if the story was squelched. I find it interesting that the pro-vax people so conveniently forget about incidents like that!

[jillc512]

My unvaxed DS had whooping cough when he was about 11 months old (unconfirmed, but a vaxed baby friend of his had a confirmed case as well). He coughed for about 3-4 weeks, but was his generally happy self otherwise. I didn't take him to the doctor, since the antibiotics used to "treat" pertussis don't lessen the symptoms, they only reduce transmission to others (and I'm hesitant to even believe THAT).

The misinformation flying around during that time (it was part of an "outbreak" in our city) was unbelievable. The baby friend's mother mentioned to a public health nurse that I did not take my DS to the doctor, and the nurse said, "So she's just going to let him DIE then?". Public health officials were also recommending an accelerated DTaP vaccine schedule for babies under a year (instead of recommending, say, exclusive breastfeeding). And, that same nurse said that DS still needed to be vaccinated because he wouldn't be immune after having it naturally.

I was upset to learn later (on this forum) that babies' immunity to whooping cough is stronger and lasts longer if they are breastfed and their mother has natural immunity (vs. vaccine immunity). So really, the argument shouldn't be that everyone needs to get vaccinated to protect little babies; it should be that children should be allowed to get the disease naturally, then breastfeed their own children through that most dangerous first 6 months to protect them.

But what do I know? I got most of my information from the Internet .