?? re, immune dysfunction/chronic illness

[LilithX]

Ok, so I am just seeking input here from those with an interest and/or special reasearch/focus in this area.

Currently, I operate a home-based child care/preschool (yes, legal, state regulated, lol!)

Spent many years working with children in center-based settings and took my degree in the field and decided after my most recent foray into seeking gainful employment in the area that I prefered to start my OWN place, since I was so appalled at the conditions in some of the others I saw. Just could NOT submit to some of the conditions/said *I* can do better than this.

ANYWAY, I have 2 siblings enrolled (4 year old boy and his 17 mth old sister) who have been with me for a yr or so.

These kids are fully vaxed and hardly ever "sick" (meaning exhibiting symptoms such as fever or vomitting, diareaha (sp) or other such acute manifestations. I have only had to send them home once for a gastro illness their mom put off to eating too many cupcakes, LOL, but HELLO! Seems my DD came down with "eating too many cupcakes" after she brought them here SICK Of course, my DD had a tummy ache for a few hrs followed by vomitting once and was fine the next morning, whereas THEY had vomitting and runny stools for a week or more. Still, obvious that this was an infectious illness/viral thing, NOT too many "cupcakes"

But they are chronically coughing and snotty, esp. the little girl. And I KNOW it is not "allergies", since my whole family caught their "allergies" several weeks ago (lingering cough, congestion) and NOW have it AGAIN after completely recovering and being exposed to it again via them STILL having it!

FTR, I really cannot send them home for such stuff, not unless I want to lose them as clients altogether, which I do not (for all my beefs, including the CRAP diet they are fed at home and their chronic low grade illness, they are great kids and their parents are great overall)

And NO, it is not that she is medicating them and sending them with supressed symptoms; they are here 11 hrs a day. Any fever would reappear within a few hrs of dosing with antipyretics. (seen it many times; the parents who dose them up with OTC meds and then they wear off in a few to 4 hrs and I have to send them home sick)

What interests me is the apparent way some kids have of being chronically ill/less than healthy, since I have seen this so many times working in child care settings; the kids who ALWAYS have snot pouring down their face, ALWAYS seem to have a cough or other symptom, but hardly EVER have fever or any other acute sign their body is fighting off an infection.

Seems MOST kids are like this, but my own have NEVER been, even when in group settings (they rarely get ill, and when they do, they spike a fever, get acute symptoms, and toss it off in a day or 2.)

What is UP with this?
My evolving theory is that there is some immune malfunction at play here that allows some infectious condition to linger at a low grade level for mths as opposed to being resolved fully/acutely.

She gives them OTC meds at night for the coughing (I don't, and they hardly ever cough while here, some, but not to the point I would resort to the meds she leaves). Plus, despite working in a drs office, she is amazingly ignorant of basics like a viral gastro infection NOT responding to antibiotics and/or being contagious!

Just fishing for some input and opinion on this. I do think vaccines play a role in this (since mine are not/very minimally vaxed and have never displayed this) but I also think nutrition and other factors play a role.

I mean, to me, it is simply NOT "normal" for a child to average "9-12 colds per year" (as the AAP says is normal) or to be "sick" all the time at this low grade, unresolving level.

My goodness, mine average maybe 1-2 colds or other illnesses per year, and theirs resolve rapidly. They don't linger for weeks/mths!

Lilith
mom to John, 13
Sage, 6

[momto l&a]

Are they allergic to something in their home? Because you said they arent very sneezy at your home.

We have a freind whos dd always has a runny nose, her Daddy smokes. So IMO there lies the cause of her snotty nose. He is such a perfect Daddy, thats the only thing he does wrong IMO

My kids are un-vacced and if they get sick they have the sickness for much less time than others. For example there was a fever puky bug going around, it seems to last 24-48 hours, my oldest had it for 8 hours.

The rest of us didnt get it, granted we where od'ing on C

Dh and I notce from just the people we know whos kids who are vacced are much sicker than those who are not. Maybe diet plays a part because for the most part those who dont vac normally watch their diet carefully.

[Momtezuma Tuatara]

You're on the mark there. If you understand what little they know about what vaccines do, then there is your answer. When you prime an immune system to primarily function at a Th2 level, artificially switch on dendritic cells, which then can't turn themselves off, this is the sort of medical consequence that should logically be expected.

The problem being that the medical profession has never had the ability to see logic until they've done 50 years of repeated large studied sorted out all their mortgages, only to come to the blindingly obvious conclusions we all knew before they started.

We will truly lose a generation. Not to immunable diseases however. There will come a time where people who have immune systems that work as they were designed to work, will be a rarity.

Some of what is important to know with relation to these kids is being discussed here:

http://www.mothering.com/discussions...d.php?t=387223

[jessicaSAR]

I wonder also how antibiotics are implicated in this kind of chronic low level illness. On a purely anecdotal level, my two kids are exactly as you describe. The vaxed older child has always struggled through colds for weeks at a time while the unvaxed younger one has much more acute, 2-3 day colds.

However, until this fall, neither one was sick very frequently (although the older one more frequently than the younger). But, this summer they both had their first dose of antibiotics for a nasty staff skin infection that caused large abscesses. They cultured the stuff, said it was MRSA and gave them a pretty hefty antibiotic. Since then we have battled one cold after another. They still respond as they did before, longer for the vaxed one, shorter and more acute for the unvaxed, but the incidence of runny noses and coughs has been much greater.

On another note, I was listening to something the other day (I'll have to look it up), that was suggesting that these "infections" may not be viral or allergies, but some sort of chronic inflammation.

I don't have any answers here, just questions.

[LilithX]

Thanks for the input

As for allergies, that is what such things often get passed off as (even DIAGNOSED as!) and given the quantity of crap in the air here (molds, industrial and automotive pollution, etc) I am not averse to accepting that there is a lot of resp. stuff which is due to pollution. I know the mold levels play havoc with me, but it doesn't make me "sick", per se, I can just feel it and know before I check that the mold levels are high. As I am aware that the pollution keeps me feeling less than ideal a lot of the time.

And some kids have allergies which result in chronic congestion/resp. issues, I know, from having worked with many of them over the years. (also known many kids with "behavior" issues from food allergies, including one typically charming little girl who was allergic to wheat, milk, corn, and many other things who would sneak the forbidden foods, and I mean to the point of eating scraps from under the table or the trash, and become a hyperactive, hostile maniac for several hours after a single bite of corn or wheat bread!)

But in this case, it is obvious that this is infectious in nature, since we all got it after exposure and a gestation period and what we had was what they had, essentially, and well, I can just tell the difference between an infectious illness/infection and some environmental reaction in myself, jmho.

Yes, I really DO think this is immune related; that their systems don't function "normally" (meaning what should be considered normal, not what passes for it nowadays!)

And yes, I DO think vaccines are a big part of why, (my goodness, SO many doses of SO many vaccines SO young! Even since we opted out, it has roughly doubled, and had doubled since DH and I were kids! And there are many studies proving that vaccinations skew the immune system towards a TH2 imbalance, I am convinced of that and amazed when anyone attempts to deny it) though I don't discount the roles of other environmental exposures and nutrition (BF vs FF, whole foods vs refined junk, etc..)

Both mine were BF for 4-5 yrs, fed a fairly decent diet (VERY decent in the case of my son and a bit less so in the case of my DD, though still FAR better than what most kids I encounter get.), rarely if ever had meds of any kind. (I think 1 round of antibiotics for my son and maybe 2 doses of Tylenol in 13 yrs and 2 rounds of antibios for DD, 3-4 doses of Tylenol, and one round of IV antibiotics. Too much on both counts, imo, and I would not do even those now, but still far less than the typical exposure, ime)

And yes, imo and experience, antibiotics definately can result in this sort of chronic "infection"/"disease", but these kids have not been on antibiotics since I have known them (over a yr).
Which doesn't mean they have not had significant exposure prior to that, of course.

And the OTC meds which I know they are given a lot at home (my official policy is that I will not administer OTC meds, only presription or homeopathic, and I have yet to resort to the OTC meds she brings sometimes; I just put them away/send them home and make it clear that if they have fever or excessive symptoms of another nature, I will call her to come get them)

Again, there is just something SO wrong with kids being sick/unwell so much of the time. If MY kids were ill/less than well so often, I would be worried about their underlying health, not rushing out to buy some OTC med to cover it up.

Lilith
PS, my DD was invited out to the zoo the other day with her uncle and cousin and told me later she ate a hot dog. Oh, lovely! Guess I should have reminded said uncle (by recent marriage) that she is a vegetarian

She didn't think anything of it, as WE eat hot dogs from time to time (just of the veggie variety).

My MIL said, when I told her about it, in passing, "oh, well one time won't HURT her, will it?" Uh, gee, probably NOT, but that is like telling an observant Jew or Muslim that their child eating pork one time won't "hurt them", lol! No, most likely won't make the difference between her living or dying but still...

This is the woman who STILL, after over 20 yrs, says things like, "Oh, we're having chicken, since you are a vegetarian." Can't find the banging my head against the wall emoticon, but please, insert here

[krissi]

My evolving theory is that there is some immune malfunction at play here that allows some infectious condition to linger at a low grade level for mths as opposed to being resolved fully/acutely.

I would believe this. I think this happened to DD last winter and I am increasingly believing that something is fundamentally wrong with her immune system (she comes from a family with genetic predisposition to immune wackiness and is about to get an ASD diagnosis). We stopped vaxing her at 6 months, but she was bf and just got her first cold ever in November 2004. After that it seemed like she was sick for the rest of the winter. I took her to the ped a couple of times and it was shrugged off as being normal. She would get intermittent clear runny noses and a nasty cough that came and went for four or five months. Since she started showing symptoms of ASD I have been reading up on the immune angle and vitamins, etc., and she is now on extra vit. C, DMG, b vitamins, and other immune boosting supplements. And so far this winter she's only had a single mild cold that is currently on the way out...despite that she attends early intervention classes with multiple other toddlers this year and last year she was just at home all the time with minimal exposure. It could be coincidence but I doubt it.