Moms Who Vax Newsletter, #1

Parent-to-Parent

We have discovered that, at least in Minnesota, the public health authorities and medical establishment is starting to pick up on the fact that parent-to-parent communication is an effective tool for increasing immunization rates. I recently participated in a panel discussion in front of local media to mark National Infant Immunization Week. On that panel were three eminent pediatricians (including the Head of Pediatrics at the Mayo Clinic), as well as noted public health authorities, me, and the amazing Shannon Duffy, whose daughter died of a vaccine-preventable disease, and not because she was choosing not to vaccine. Take a look at the link for her story. Shannon's story is so profoundly moving and devastating, and it is an effective way to get the message across to new and expecting parents.

After that media event, I stood with these brilliant doctors and talked about vaccine-resistance. They said all the right things, talked about explaining the lack of a link between vaccines and autism, about continuing to press the message in appointment after appointment, but at a certain point, I said: "You know what would have helped make the decision easier for me? If the word 'death' had been used in my discussions with my pediatrician. She allowed me to delay my son's MMR (by 3 months) without fighting me on it at all. Telling me that measles can cause death would have kept me up at night." The doctors looked at one another, but Shannon nodded vigorously. Doctors have become afraid of using the D word, even when warranted. We are warned time and time again of the risk of death from anesthesia, rare as it is. Why do we not hear this, even in passing, in the pediatrician's office? Is it too harsh? I got the feeling from the doctors that it was. But it's all in the delivery, I reminded them. You don't get the James Mason God-voice and boom "Death!" You say, gently, that you are ethically obligated to let them know that the risk of not vaccinating includes serious disability or death. 'Nuff said.

Patient Liaisons

Since the NIIW panel, the Minnesota Department of Health has asked me to be part of two more panels, including one on vaccine resistance. I also noticed that at my son's pediatrician's office, they are looking for volunteers to act as liaisons between the medical community and parents, not just for vaccine issues, but including them. I plan on volunteering for this and would urge anyone in the Twin Cities to volunteer as well. If you don't live in Minnesota, consider offering this service to your pediatrician. It's a given these days that nearly every practice will have some unvaccinated children. It is in our children's best interest to get these kids vaccinated, because an infant in the waiting room is incredibly vulnerable to a sick unvaccinated child. Whooping cough and measles have both recently been spread in this manner. Consider approaching your pediatrician with a proposal to run a few casual gatherings with new parents. Have a doctor present, of course, but as a parent, your experience has much more weight in so many cases (as sad as this is). 

Law Changes

In Minnesota, we are looking to close the loophole that allows conscientious objectors to vaccines to face no obstacles in getting their children admitted to school. We do not know where to begin. If any of the Moms (or Dads) who vax out there have advice, connections, pointers, etc., for us, we'd be grateful. We are targeting our state legislature, and think we may have a representative who will present the bill, if we can only get this thing started. Several of our Minnesota Moms Who Vax feel the anti-vax movement in Minnesota is ramping up again. There is even a new "political party" based on vaccine rejectionism, called the Canary Party. We are looking for advice from knowledgeable folks about how to build this grassroots movement of vaccinating parents, to help vaccinating parents to shake off the complacency and become more active in this fight. Please e-mail us at momswhovax@gmail.com if you have any tips or would like to help.

Success Story

Finally, I just wanted to share this heartening story from our Mom Who Vaxs, Carly. Her cousin comes from a family of non-vaccinators; their father is a chiropractor who has taught his kids that vaccines cause all sorts of horrible things. This person's sister is not vaccinating her new baby because "a friend of mine's child developed Down's Syndrome after being vaccinated." Knowing this as background, Carly's story may brighten your day.

Hi ladies,

I had to share a small piece of good news on the immunization front. My cousin John's baby arrived a few days ago. I went to visit them yesterday at the hospital, and they ARE vaccinating the baby! Their son got the Hep A vaccine at the hospital. John said he spoke to a pediatrician that was willing to sit down and explain everything to him, which he appreciated, and his wife is vaccinated herself and in favor of it. John is also getting himself vaccinated and the doctor started him out with the whooping cough vaccine.

So in this case, a pediatrician taking a hard line and refusing to discuss the immunizations would have turned my cousin off. The soft approach worked better in reaching this "middle of the road" parent.

Hope you both and your kids are well!

Carly

Join In

For so many of us, immunizing our children is just another part of the insanely busy work of being a parent. It is so routine that many of us feel complacent when it comes to the dangers posed by those who don't immunize. Today I ask you to shake off that complacency and consider joining the effort to bring up immunization rates in every community in order to protect infants, immuno-compromised children who can't be immunized, and vaccinated children who fall in that tiny percentage of the population for whom vaccinations are not effective.

Join our mailing list by e-mailing us at momswhovax[at]gmail.com.

Peace of Mind

As a new or expecting parent, you'll have to get used to the idea that your child will be sick. A lot. It's part of life, this acquisition of viruses and bacterial infections. And while it can be hard to watch your child cough, sniffle, become feverish, battle a sore throat, etc., at least we know her immune system is growing stronger and figuring out a way to let her live among other human beings without being crippled by illness. 

That being said, you can probably expect to feel the way I still feel, after two kids, every time my kids get perhaps a little sicker than usual: anxious, worried, and perhaps even a little obsessed. For example, my nineteen-month-old has been sick for the last five days with what was a mysterious but brutal ailment. She was listless, not herself, eyes red-rimmed, running a high fever, and crying a lot. Her brother had been complaining of a sore throat. A visit to the doctor, and the follow-up three days later, showed no strep. He was off to school a couple days later, none the worse for wear. But my daughter was just not doing well at all. I found myself looking through my book of childhood illnesses, scrutinizing symptoms, wondering what she might have and if I should bring her to the doctor (my son's doctor didn't think it necessary to bring my daughter in, since his strep test was negative). 

As soon as I opened the book that old familiar feeling appeared. Blood and heart racing, getting hot, almost sweaty, feeling panicked. Measles? Meningitis? Mumps? Pertussis? I churned for about half a second, until I realized: wait, my daughter has been vaccinated against these deadly diseases. At least, I thought to myself, I don't have to worry about those. The peace of mind I felt instantly upon realizing that I had vaccinated my daughter (and son) so they would not contract these awful, sometimes fatal diseases was one of the greatest endorsements of my decision to vaccinate. Sure, I could move on to other worries, like strep throat (which is what it turned out to be after a visit to Urgent Care), but I no longer feared for my daughter's life. And while that may sound an extreme reaction to your child's illness, trust me, it's sort of a boilerplate reaction. Somewhere, in the back of your mind, a parent wonders if the sickness might be something awful.

My thoughts turned to parents who don't vaccinate. How, I wondered, could they cope psychologically with common childhood illness, not knowing if it was measles or the rather harmless roseola? Could it be pertussis or just a bad cough? The uncertainty would be my undoing. And in the middle of an outbreak, like the measles outbreak of Minnesota and the pertussis outbreak that killed children in California, the fear would be too much to bear. 

If you are trying to decide whether to vaccinate your children, consider your future self, waking up in the middle of some future night, and finding your baby running a terribly high fever in her crib. You don't what's going on--this is your first, perhaps. Do you want to run, in your head, the gamut of all the potential deadly vaccine-preventable diseases your child could have, signaled by this fever, that rash, this cough, these enlarged glands? Or do you want to have at least the peace of mind to know that the odds are hugely in your favor that your child is protected from the worst childhood diseases out there, and that this fever might indicate Fifth's Disease or Roseola or another annoying but basically harmless childhood virus? Do your future, sleep-deprived self, and your child, a favor and immunize.

Father of Three Autistic Boys Speaks Out--in Favor of Vaccines

Please take the time to read this post from Rob's blog Lost & Tired. He is the father of three boys, all of whom fall somewhere on the spectrum.

Biography of a Measles Outbreak

Wondering how a vaccine-preventable disease outbreak can spread? Wired offers a clear-eyed view from the Arizona measles outbreak. As parents facing the choice about whether to immunize our children, we owe it to them to understand the truth about the presence of vaccine-preventable diseases in our country and communities, how they get here, and how they spread. You can read the story of the Arizona measles outbreak here, but below you'll find an excerpt from the play-by-play of how that outbreak unfolded. If any non-vaccinating parent has told you that these diseases are effectively gone in the United States, and that immunization is unnecessary, take a look at how measles spread in Arizona. Please also take special note of two facts: one, that the outbreak was started by an adult who had traveled to another country and returned to the United States and two, that many of the victims were children who had intentionally been left unvaccinated as well as infants who had not had a chance to be vaccinated:


In February 2008, a 37-year-old Swiss woman who had never been vaccinated against measles arrived in Tucson after a visit to Mexico. She developed breathing problems and a rash and went to a local hospital’s emergency room. They suspected she had a viral illness and admitted her.

Here’s what you have to know, to understand what happened next. Measles is extremely contagious; up to 90 percent of unvaccinated people who are exposed to it will get it. And if someone nearby has it, youwill get exposed — because coughed-out measles virus can travel across a room, and hangs in the air for hours. The best protection against spreading measles in a hospital is putting someone in a negative-pressure isolation room, which is engineered so no air can leak out into the rest of the hospital. It took two days to get the Swiss tourist into isolation, because measles is rare enough in the US that it was not the hospital personnel’s first thought.

Meanwhile:

A 50-year-old woman who had spent an hour in the ER at the same time as the Swiss woman caught the disease from her. Patient 2 got taken care of, went home, and started feeling feverish nine days later. She had difficulty breathing and thought at first she was having an asthma attack, so she went back to the hospital and was admitted for two days. That she had measles would not be discovered until six days after that.

While she was  in the hospital, Patient 2 unknowingly infected a 41-year-old health care worker who took care of her — and who was scheduled to get a measles-vaccine booster shot that very day, because the hospital was also caring for the tourist. Patient 2 also passed measles to an unvaccinated 11-month-old boy who was in the same ER while she was waiting to get checked for asthma, and to two unvaccinated siblings — 3 and 5 years old — who were visiting their mother on the same hospital floor after Patient 2 was admitted.

Patient 3, the health-care worker, passed measles to a 47-year-old woman in her emergency department — who later  ended up in an intensive care unit with measles pneumonia — and later to a 41-year-old man in his home. Patient 4, the toddler, gave the virus to an unvaccinated 1-year-old while they were both in the same pediatrician’s office. Five other people were infected somewhere in their everyday lives: a 2-year-old boy who had never been vaccinated and who also ended up in an ICU with seizures brought on by high fever; a 9-month-old and an 8-month-old, also unvaccinated; and two adults, 35 and 37, who might have gotten one dose as children, but had no documentation of receiving a second dose.

Those 14 are just the confirmed cases. In addition to them, there were 363 suspected ones, and today’s paper makes clear authorities believe there were more illnesses than they know. And for every known case, there were dozens or hundreds of exposed people who had to be checked: 145 passengers on the tourist’s flight from Mexico, 1,795 patients in the ER that treated Patient 2, 25 people who attended church with Patient 7, 10 kids in the same day care center as Patient 8.

I'm Mad, Part One: Mercury/Thimerosal

New and expecting parents are bombarded with information about all the bad things they'll need to keep their children away from: BPA in bottles, parabens in lotions and bath supplies, phthalates and PVC in toys and teethers. It can be overwhelming. And yet the science linking these three chemicals to negative health effects is thus far nearly conclusive (I will link to CDC studies on these chemicals at the end of the article). Luckily, phasing them out of your life is a risk-free and mostly hassle-free endeavor. Most if not all baby bottles today are free from BPA; in some states, including Minnesota, phthalates are not allowed in children's products. Parabens are easily identifiable in personal products (look for methylparaben, butylparane, propylparaben) and can be avoided. There is no trade-off. You are not putting your child at risk by choosing a BPA-free bottle.

So after crossing those things off the list, new and expecting parents often turn to vaccines. And many of them make the same mistake I made as a new parent. They turn to Google, the place where eminent scientific mind Jenny McCarthy says she got her "degree."The first sites we find are not Every Child By Two and the Centers for Disease Control, the Gates Foundation and Partners in Health. Instead, we find sites like the so-called National Vaccine Information Center, which masquerades as an impartial watchdog agency (hence the "org" in its web address), and Vaccines.net, which claims that vaccines cause all sorts of diseases and allergies. For the neophyte, it is nearly impossible to sort the wheat from the chaff here, and the effort to do so can be absolutely terrifying.

You will hear lots of terrible things about vaccines. Nearly all of them are lies. The word "lie" is inflammatory, but I use it here deliberately. It is a word, and a characterization, you will not see on public health websites, from the CDC, from Every Child by Two, or any of the sites of organizations whose job it is to study the safety and efficacy of vaccines. Even though they know this is true. 

But we're parents who have been on both sides of this debate. We've been scared, too. But after looking at the science and putting things in perspective--something the anti-vax community will not do, perhaps because they are incapable, perhaps because their science literacy is so low--we got mad. 

I'm mad about lots of things. We all are. In an effort to save some new parents the same heartache, worry, anxiety that we suffered as we tried to figure out the vaccine thing--and to keep parents from delaying their children's immunizations out of fear, as a few of us did before we understood our mistake, putting our kids' lives at risk in the process--we are initiating a series of "I'm Mad" posts. These posts will address some of the most volatile but common claims anti-vaxxers make when trying to scare new parents out of immunizing their children. Today we start with the thimerosal question.

Claim: Thimerosal in vaccines causes/caused autism. If it doesn't, it's still toxic. 

I worried about thimerosal for a while. People told me it was straight-up mercury being injected into my child's body. Mercury is poison, right? It's what is causing all this autism, because although thimerosal has been used a preservative in vaccines for decades, without the attendant rise in autism, our kids just get so many more immunizations now, right? 

Well--except that thimerosal hasn't been in vaccines since 2000/2001 and autism rates continue to skyrocket. I shouldn't have to point out, but I will, that this is the exact opposite effect of what we'd see if thimerosal caused autism, as anti-vaxxers long claimed. I later learned that the preservative had been taken out of vaccines by the government and public health authorities not because of any toxicity concerns but because parents believed the Wakefield study and they feared vaccination rates would fall if this gesture was not made. Thimerosal does not cause autism (Immunizations and Autism: A Review of the Literature in the Canadian Journal of Neuroscience). 

Mercury poisoning? That sounds scary. Except that your typical tuna sandwich contains much more mercury than a single vaccine. Actually, the mercury in tuna is scarier, because it is methyl mercury, a serious neurotoxin, while the mercury in vaccines is ethyl mercury, which is, even at high doses, far less toxic than methyl mercury (but in the doses we're talking about in vaccines are literally traces anyway). Bottom line: mercury poisoning is an impossibility when it comes to vaccines, even if you were to get the whole course of childhood vaccines (back when they contained thimerosal) in a single week.

But here's the main point that goes overlooked. Right now, vaccines are nearly the lowest-risk medicine we have available to us. The reports of adverse effects--which include fever and soreness at the injection site--are so low compared to the number of doses administered, that they are considered one of the safest, if not the single safest, medicine in the world. And their benefits are this: they keep your child alive. It is as simple as that.

Too few of us parents have seen measles. I know of no one who has seen polio, except for people who have lived in Afghanistan and India, where polio is still endemic. Endemic. This means it is "regularly" found in a population. Know anyone who travels to India? Might there be any children at your local school who have Indian relatives? I know there are at least eight in my child's preschool alone. I hasten to add that their parents didn't think twice about immunizing them, because of their travels and because they, too, had seen these diseases take lives when they were growing up. Is there a reason why your husband or wife might be required to get a polio shot if he/she hasn't gotten one if she/he is deployed to Afghanistan? This stuff is a plane ride away. And it is not theoretical.

Haven't seen what Tetanus looks like? Here is a photo of a child with tetanus. Here is a photo of a child who suffered polio. Measles looks like this. Is it worth forgoing vaccines against diseases like this, and many others, that are absolutely extant in our world and either in this country (or in my case, my state) or a plane ride away, carried home by an unwitting traveler much like the toddler who brought measles back to Minnesota from Kenya this winter, because of fear of a toxicity that simply doesn't exist? It's something to consider. For me, it became an easy answer when considered this way. 

Science-Based Medicine offers a look at the claims of toxicity of vaccines that you are likely to hear as you explore the vaccine question. We owe it to ourselves to read the post in its entirety before making any decisions about whether or not to get on board with some of the more inflammatory claims we still hear from people who don't vaccinate their children and don't want you to vaccinate either. 

You can also get the word from these organizations. Below are links to their statements on the safety/toxicity of thimerosal. Again, this is really a moot point, as no childhood vaccines, save the multi-dose vial version of the flu shot, contain any thimerosal. But it's a point worth making, as it demonstrates the ways anti-vax proponents will manipulate and misinterpret the science to new parents, hoping that most of them won't bother to look into their claims.

World Health Organization's Statement on Thimerosal

 Centers for Disease Control Statement on Thimerosal

FDA on Thimerosal

Journal of Pediatrics publishes study on mercury in vaccines

Mom to Mom: Pam's Story

Pam's son Zachary

I received all of my vaccinations on time as a child growing up. My mother was a medical technologist and had taken blood from a patient infected with measles. She had seen these diseases first hand. I began to look more deeply into vaccines when I was pregnant with my first child, during the fall/winter of 2009. I knew the H1N1 flu vaccine was recommended, especially for pregnant women, and I was considering whether I should get the H1N1 vaccine as well as the regular flu vaccine. The first thing I did was talk to family and friends who were pregnant or had been pregnant to find out what they had done. I spoke to people who were pro-vaccine as well as people who were anti-vaccine. My own doctor's strong recommendation as well as hearing about pregnant women who had died from H1N1 led me to get both flu vaccines while pregnant. After my decision to vaccinate myself, I began further research about vaccines for my baby. I found that a lot of what I heard and read from the anti-vaccine side had a strong basis in fear and "what if" thinking. What if vaccines cause autism? What if vaccines are causing the rise in allergies among children? While these possibilities triggered what I would call the "fear mind," my rational mind was able to look at the research available online, much of which I found through Ashley's blog (Science for Sale). I saw that the research overwhelmingly supported the safety of vaccines. I could also see that the pro-vaccine argument was research-based, history proven, and logical. In addition to online research, I questioned pediatricians whenever I had the opportunity. I spoke with 5 different pediatricians who all recommended vaccinating without reserve. They said they vaccinated their own children and grandchildren. They spoke of the dangers of not vaccinating. We decided to vaccinate our son Zachary, and he has received all his vaccinations on time starting from the day he was born. He has been extremely healthy and the only reaction to the vaccines has been a couple hours of being tired and cranky. I do still get nervous when I bring him to get vaccinated. I wish the doctors gave more information about what he is being vaccinated for and the ingredients in the vaccine and the safety of those ingredients. Regarding those details, I had to find out the information on my own. I understand doctors and nurses are busy and weary of the vaccine debate, but I think it would help parents who are nervous about vaccines to have more access to information. 

Regarding my interaction with the anti-vaccine community, I have had a hard time with this because I have three cousins who I was very close with growing up who are not vaccinated. Their father is a chiropractor and for whatever reason did not trust that vaccines were safe. They are now all having babies of their own, and the vaccine issue has surfaced in discussion and emails. The discussion can get contentious, and I don't want to create a bad relationship with family members, so I try to relay the pro-vaccine argument as clearly and objectively as possible. Although I have not expressed my personal fears to my cousins for fear of ruining our relationship completely, I do fear for my son who is almost 11 months and has not received all his vaccinations yet. I want my children to be able to play with and know their cousins, but as a mother I know I have to protect my child in the best way I can. I would feel responsible if he contracted a vaccine-preventable illness from people who I knew were not vaccinated. I know that I'm taking a risk when my son is around these family members and its an issue that I still struggle with. 


If you are a parent who chooses to vaccinate and would like to share your story, please send us your story. We are also always looking for cute pictures of your vaccinated baby or child for our "Cute Vaccinated Kid of the Week"!