When Vaccines Do Harm to Kids

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Feb 28, 2000 | by Aimee Howd

Thousands of parents have described injuries in their kids that they believe are linked to shots. But the research community maintains the claims have no scientific merit.

The safety and efficacy of the 12 million doses of vaccines approved by the federal government, mandated in states and administered to American children every year will receive unrelenting scrutiny in Washington as long as Republican Rep. Dan Burton of Indiana has anything to say about it. "I stated at the Aug. 3 hearing [published as Vaccines -- Finding the Balance Between Public Safety and Personal Choice] that as long as I remain chairman of the Government Reform Committee, we are going to continue looking into vaccine issues, and I will keep my word," Burton tells Insight.

On Dec. 9, 1993, the congressman's daughter, Danielle Burton Sarkine, took her 5-week-old daughter, Alex, to her pediatrician for a dose of the hepatitis B vaccine. The infant responded to the shot with high-pitched screams and was inconsolable. She still was crying hours later when her parents put her into her crib for the night. Checking on her when the cries at last subsided, they found a parent's worst nightmare: Alex had stopped breathing. Danielle began CPR immediately and the baby gasped her first breath just as paramedics arrived. Alex spent an intense three-and-a-half weeks in the hospital but went home with a clean bill of health. Not so for her little brother, Christian. On June 1, 1998, this happy 14-month-old received nine vaccines in one day. His mother says his entire disposition changed overnight. By the next day, he was screaming. Within a week and a half the baby had begun slamming his head on the floor, slapping himself and banging his head against a wall. Soon he was diagnosed with mild to moderate autism, a condition that is manageable but chronic. Since his immunizations, Christian's life has been a series of therapy sessions for speech and developmental disorders.

Coincidence? Among the pieces of the puzzle publicized by Insight:

* Rates of autism have skyrocketed. However, public-health officials say better diagnostics account for the 273 percent increase in cases reported in California during the last 11 years.

* An average of 13,000 reports of neurological and autoimmune trauma following on the heels of vaccination, especially the hepatitis B inoculation, have been filed annually since 1990 with the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, a voluntary program, at the Food and Drug Administration, or FDA. Yet many public-health officials interviewed for this article claim the reported events are coincidental, reveal no patterns and are not worth investigating.

* Since the 1930s, when children often received just one vaccination, many immunizations have contained a 49.6 percent mercury preservative called thimerosal. Most children today receive 33 doses of 10 vaccines by age 5, generally receiving several vaccines per visit on their immunization schedules. Reports surfaced in 1999 that infants being vaccinated using multi-dose vials, such as hepatitis B and MMR (measles, mumps and rubella), with thimerosal can receive 62.5 micrograms of mercury per visit. This is 100 times the exposure federal Environmental Protection Guidelines consider safe for the average-sized infant, as mercury is known to cause neurotoxicity and brain damage that mirrors the symptoms of autism. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, is encouraging the development of thimerosal-free doses and has withdrawn its recommendation that infants receive the thimerosal-containing hepatitis B vaccine at birth. However, the CDC maintains that mercury in vaccines never has caused an adverse reaction and is not pulling thimerosal-containing vaccines off the shelves.

* Oral polio vaccines contain live viruses that can cause polio and are being replaced with a killed-virus version. The DTP (diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis) inoculation, acknowledged within the federal government to be the source of brain damage in some cases, still is on the market; a modified version, the DTaP, is said to be safer and is commonly used. The MMR vaccine has been a suspected cause of autism for more than a decade. The rotavirus inoculation, a vaccine against usually mild diarrhea, was recalled last year after it was found to cause bowel blockage and collapse in infants.

According to Charles Prober of Stanford University, an American Academy of Pediatrics spokesman on immunizations, "Each of the individual vaccines has some recognized side effects with varying degrees of frequency" but scientifically documented severe reactions are "very rare. And autism has not been shown to be caused by vaccines in any sort of credible study. Measles shots are given at 15 to 18 months of age -- and autism typically appears about the same time. The same [temporal association] is true for many of the other autoimmune and chronic neurologic disorders." He adds, "Anything that is reasonably plausible in terms of how vaccines interact with immune and neurologic systems are vigorously explored. Vaccine developers, governmental organizations and manufacturers have a vested interest in understanding them."