If you don't vax for measles, be prepared to help your child through this...

Jim Gehrz via Startribune.com

Editor's Note: Author of the now-defunct Vaccine Times, Leart Shaka, has graciously allowed Moms Who Vax to re-post several of his articles. His work on vaccine education was immensely helpful. The story below is his, sourced from Maura Lerner's excellent Minneapolis Star Tribune article.

Little Mahi is very unlucky: he nearly died of measles. He contracted measles while traveling overseas. He was not vaccinated due to his young age. He was 9 months when his family left for Kenya. Although Mahi’s parents intended to get him vaccinated on time according to the recommended schedule, they didn’t know that although the first shot of the MMR vaccine isn’t given until 12 months, for overseas travelers different rules apply. Mahi should have been given a vaccine prior to his trip to Kenya. His chances of getting the disease would have been slashed by over 90% if that had happened.

Little Mahi is very lucky: he nearly died of measles, but he didn’t; he beat the disease. After contracting measles he had a 1/20 chance of getting pneumonia, which he unfortunately did. On August 10, his mother brought him to the emergency room with very high fever. Within days, baby Mahi was on life support, hanging by a thread.

“I didn’t think I’d be able to hold him again,” his mother said Friday, as she cuddled him in her lap.

[...]

On his fifth day in the hospital, Mahi took a dangerous turn. He was transferred to intensive care, hooked up to a breathing machine and given antibiotics to battle the pneumonia. For days, he was sedated and barely moved.

“It was really hard,” said his mother. “It was like watching a dead body.”

The medical experts were equally worried. Mahi, said Stinchfield, was “teetering near death.”

After nearly two weeks in intensive care, Mahi started to wake up, as doctors eased up on the sedation.

On Tuesday, they took off his breathing tube. “He opened his eyes and looked at me,” said his mother, and he squeezed her hand. “Look at this!” she thought. “I couldn’t believe he could be that strong.” When he started crying when she stepped away, she was thrilled. “Wow, my son knows me,” she said.

Little Mahi is lucky to have beaten measles, unfortunately 1-2/1,000 children who contract the disease will not be so lucky, despite the best medical care they can be given. Measles is not a trivial disease. It can land you in the hospital like it did baby Mahi, it can leave a child deaf, and it can kill. Do not be swayed by the conspiracy theorists. Do not delay.

Inject to protect.


Editor's Comment: Mahi was not vaccinated because he had not yet reached the 12-15 months of age recommended for the MMR shot (though he should have been vaccinated before traveling overseas). But what happened to him can happen to any unvaccinated child. Delaying a vaccine out of fear or because of recommendations from a vaccine-hesitant parent-friend puts your child at grave risk for those months that she is left unprotected, especially now that measles has come roaring back to life all over the country because people are not vaccinating their children. My kids have received two MMR vaccines. My eighteen-month-old had to receive her MMR booster (typically scheduled for four-years-old) just six months after her first one because of the Minnesota measles outbreak this winter. It's not the time interval that bothers me--it doesn't bother me at all. What bothers me is that anti-vax parents forced me in to the doctor's office for a shot two-and-a-half years early. 

Letter to the Editor

UPDATE TWO: Unfortunately, the response from MN Parent was pretty disappointing. There was no real correction. Instead, there was a clarification that no study has been shown to link vaccines and autism. Instead of acknowledging the other errors in the piece, the editors felt they needed to validate the mother's search for "truth"--apparently even if in that search she misinforms thousands of parents--and use this as a reason they do not challenge her facts. Also, the editors disputed the information I gave them about the state with the highest rate of autism. I guess the CDC isn't reliable enough. It's enough to make me think that this publication has an anti-vaxxer pretty high on the masthead. It's really too bad...it's an otherwise nice magazine.


UPDATE: I received a gracious reply from the executive editor of MN Parent. There might be a correction run in the next issue. I will keep you updated.


Editor's Note: In the August 2011 issue of Minnesota Parent, a local free publication distributed in Minnesota, a mother was profiled in the magazine's "Real Parents" feature. The parent, Jennifer Vanderhorst-Larson, is the parent of a ten-year-old autistic child. She seems like a nice lady. However, in her profile, and uncorrected by the editors of the publication, she makes some statements about vaccines and autism that are egregious and false, including the jaw-dropping assertion that "1 in 28 Somali children" are autistic (They make up 1 in 28 in a population of diagnosed autistic children.) I was literally sick to my stomach after reading her profile and decided I had to speak up. Below find my letter to the editor. I am posting this to encourage other Moms and Dads Who Vax to speak up whenever the media fails to do its job when discussing this issue. When we remain silent, we agree. And members of the media cannot be allowed to fall down on the job on this issue, when lives are at stake. 

Dear Editors,

I was distressed and profoundly disappointed after reading the Real Parents in this month's Minnesota Parent. As a mother and journalist, I have always enjoyed the reportage and first-person accounts in your magazine. But upon reading Jennifer Vanderhorst-Larson's profile, I was struck dumb. You profile a mother of an autistic child who is involved with special education efforts. That's great. However, you allow her to speak as an expert on vaccines, autism, and even the incidence of autism in the Somali community, all the while not doing any fact-checking of her statements, and writing, as the editorial voice introducing her, that her child was diagnosed with autism after his fifteen-month vaccinations, instead of stating how old Cade was when he was diagnosed, which would have avoided creating a link in the reader's mind. As you know, study after study after study has found absolutely no link between vaccines and autism. As you also know, children and infants have fallen ill and died from vaccine-preventable diseases because people are not vaccinating their children because of a fear of this non-existent link.

Just to give you a sense of how badly Vanderhorst-Larson got her facts wrong, she says that there was no study on combo vaccines when her son was vaccinated nine years ago. In fact, in 1997, this study (http://cid.oxfordjournals.org/content/24/5/925.short) was published in Clinical Infectious Diseases about the safety of the MMR combo vaccine when given with another vaccine. In 2001, there was this study in the Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal (http://journals.lww.com/pidj/Abstract/2001/10000/Safety_and_immunogenicity_of_a_pentavalent.11.aspx) showing the safety of the dTap combo vaccine. Both were published ten or more years ago, before or within those first fifteen months of her son Cade's birth. More studies on combo vaccines have been published since (http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=combination+vaccine+safety&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart). and all of them have found the combo vaccines safe. This was a crucial piece of information left out of the profile, and it makes me wonder if it was intentional. In any case, Vanderhorst-Larson's comment that there were no studies on combo vaccines when Cade was vaccinated is incorrect and misleading.

She also says Minnesota has the highest rate of autism. This is incorrect. In the latest, most comprehensive accounting of autism diagnoses in this country, the CDC found New Jersey had the highest incidence of autism, 1 in 94. 

Finally, in what I think is the most egregious mistake in her story, she says 1 in 28 Somali children in the Twin Cities have autism. She may not understand the statistics she is looking at: the Minnesota Department of Health estimated that of diagnosed autistic children in Minnesota, you could expect to find a Somali child in one of every 28 diagnosed children. This is a far cry from 1 in 28 Somali children, which is what she states in her profile. There is, in fact, no firm number on the incidence of autism in the Somali community--and that is why the CDC just funded a study to discover the incidence and to understand why it seems to be higher than other populations. I won't bore you with her misapplication of the word epidemic in connection to autism and the possibility that it is, in part, a genetic disorder.

It's disappointing to see the vaccine-autism myth handled in this way by a trusted local publication that aims to support and educate parents, and usually does. I believe the responsible thing to do in this case would to have been either to keep to Vanderhorst-Larson's area of expertise--education and founding IT companies--and edit out her comments on vaccines and statistics (unless you planned to fact-check those statistics and her claims about vaccines, which didn't happen) or to run an editor's note with her profile pointing out that autism and vaccines have not been found to have any link, despite numerous studies that have looked for that link. This is not a matter of opinion; if it were, I wouldn't be writing to you. This is a matter of science and public health, and it is reckless for a publication like yours to let a parent spread false, misleading, and downright scary information in a forum such as your Real Parents profile, which I bet is a very popular part of your magazine. (Definitely the first page I turn to!)  Errors like Vanderhorst-Larson's, which are very, very commonly heard in the anti-vaccination community, cannot go uncorrected. I beg you to run an editor's note correcting her misstatements of fact, lest a new parent read these comments and choose not to vaccinate her baby because of them. Let that parent, at least, make that decision based on facts, not falsehoods. Thank you.

Ashley Shelby

Andrew Wakefield in Twin Cities to Speak to Somali Community

A friend of mine at the Minnesota Department of Health told me that disgraced doctor--and elaborate fraudster--Andrew Wakefield has made his way to the Twin Cities this week to speak to the Somali community about vaccines. He will be speaking at a Somali restaurant. I don't have the address yet, but I will post it when I find out.

Minnesota's measles outbreak has made national news, largely because of the sheer number of infected children (equalling in a single month the total number of measles cases recorded in Minnesota in the last five years) and because the outbreak was started by an unvaccinated child. The story becomes even more layered when you take into account the outbreak is taking place largely in the Somali community at the moment, where vaccination rates are hovering around 30% because of fear of vaccines. This fear has been fanned by people like Wakefield, who was here in December warning parents against vaccines, and Generation Rescue, which sends volunteers into the community as "advocates" but who instead infect worried parents with bogus fears of vaccine danger.

The Minnesota Department of Health may stage a counter-event, but they are very keen to let the leadership within the Somali community lead the way, something Wakefield and Generation Rescue, and other anti-vax folks have not bothered about. There are a number of vocal pediatricians and doctors of Somali descent trying to speak out about this, but I believe this requires a community-wide effort. Very unfortunately, the public health authorities are mistrusted; volunteers from Generation Rescue have told many Somali parents that the Department of Health doesn't care about their children or their concerns. It's time for those of us who vaccinate our kids to step forward and take our place on the front line to combat this, or else more unvaccinated children--including babies too young to be immunized--fall seriously ill, or die.

Anti-Vaxxers and Somali Immigrants: Biography of a Measles Outbreak

When I told my husband about the measles outbreak in the Minnesota Somali community, he was rendered speechless. As an immigrant himself—he immigrated to this country from Peru with his family when he was eleven—he found the idea of immigrants, especially from developing nations, refusing vaccinations straining his credulity. In Peru, and certainly in other developing nations, preventable diseases run rampant because of a scarcity of vaccines. Measles is widespread in Africa, including Kenya, from where the Somali infant believed to be the source of the current outbreak had just returned after a trip. Polio is still extant in Asia, including India. Seeing these horrors first-hand, and wanting vaccines for their children but being unable to get them, made vaccines a no-brainer when my husband’s family came to the United States.

“Immigrants are the first ones in line at immunization clinics,” my husband said. “I just don’t understand why this immigrant community would be anti-vaxxers.”

I know.

The Somali communities in both Minnesota and Sweden, which are roughly on the same latitude lines (this comes into play later), have been suffering what seems like higher than normal occurrences of autism in their children. Faced with a terrifying illness with no easy answers, Somali immigrants have often been understandably frightened and looking for reasons why their children have changed so dramatically. Autism rates in Somali are so low as to be considered non-existent. There must be something happening in this new country that is causing this dread disease.

Anti-vaxxers saw an in. Typically unconcerned with lower-income immigrant populations, they saw this cluster of fear as an opportunity to advance their misinformation campaign. Generation Rescue, in particular, made it their mission to begin “educating” Minnesota Somalis about the non-existent links between autism and vaccines. Patti Carroll, a mother living in Shoreview, Minnesota, and a Generation Rescue volunteer, took it upon herself to “advocate” for Somali parents who were parents of autistic children and didn’t want to vaccinate their other children because of the fear of vaccines. She attended a community meeting, that was also attended by representatives from the Minnesota Department of Health and, as she writes, “My suspicions were confirmed: the Department of Health was planning to assure the Somali parents that there was no connection between vaccines and autism.” Incidentally, here is a link to her article: http://www.autismone.org/content/minnesota-department-health-closing-door-truth-somali-children-autism-patti-carroll.


She subsequently was part of an effort to get copies of the film Autism Yesterday—Autism is Reversable, a 26-minute “documentary” that advances claims that autism is reversible and “preventable," subtitled in the Somali language and circulated in other “Somali settlements.”

            In 2009, the New York Times focused on Generation Rescue’s attempt to terrify Somali parents into not vaccinating their children, and to be suspicious of medical authorities, and even their own pediatricians. JB Handley of the organization actually told Somali parents, point-blank, that their children’s autism was caused by vaccines. From the New York Times, 

[Handley] warned them not to trust the state health department and suggested they slow down their children’s shots and get exemptions to school vaccination requirements. He also offered to pay for some to attend an antivaccine conference.

It is no wonder that vaccination rates among Minnesota Somalis have fallen to 30%. Yes. You read that right. 70% of Somali children are unvaccinated. And a large number of these children return regularly to the African continent, where communicable, vaccine-preventable diseases are commonplace. Generation Rescue, and anti-vaxxers caught up in the Somali question, have used these desperate parents as pawns in their despicable misinformation campaign. And it won’ t be long before these Somali families are not only coping with autism, but with children disabled, or killed, by preventable diseases. The anti-vax campaign has been so successful that last December, Andrew Wakefield was invited by the Somali community to speak on autism and vaccines. 


The blame for this will fall squarely on the shoulders of anti-vaccine advocates who gunned for this vulnerable population. Somalis are a vulnerable population because they are new immigrants, many of them don't speak the language, and precious few of us in Minnesota speak theirs, and they are suddenly faced with a strange new disease that seems to be affecting a large number of children in their community. Doctors, correctly, can give them no definitive answers. People from organizations like Generation Rescue tell these parents that they do have definitive answers--vaccines cause autism. And when these unvaccinated children begin developing autism at the same rate as the vaccinated population, I wonder what their answer will be then. We can no longer afford to sit by and watch this unfold. We must step forward as vaccinating parents and make our voices heard.

Incidentally, one of the more interesting theories about the cluster of autism cases in both Minnesota and Sweden has to do with Vitamin D deficiency. Individuals with darker skin require more Vitamin D, and with the sun too far from the earth in both Sweden and Minnesota during the winter months, even pale-skinned folks like me suffer from Vitamin D deficiency. But I’ll get into that in another post.

For now, we must begin try to repair the damage done by the anti-vax campaign in the Somali community.