Here is a brief refresher on this series:

1. Vaccine Ingredients (Part I)
2. Timing of Vaccines (Part II)
3. Vaccine Safety Studies (Part III)

My biggest issue with the chicken pox vaccine as well as the new H1N1 vaccine is that there haven’t been any long term studies done. With the chicken pox vaccine no studies have been undertaken to determine if it confers life long immunity. Sure it may protect you from the pox when you’re a kid but what happens when you’re an adult? You don’t get chicken pox as an adult; it becomes a much more serious illness called shingles. More studies need to be done.

Not all babies are created equal. When Tristan was born he was 7lbs 11oz, Maya was only 5lbs 14oz. Even now Maya is still a little peanut. Why should she get the same vaccine dose as a much bigger baby? She doesn’t get the same Tylenol dose. It just doesn’t make sense. Where are the studies looking into this?

What about babies who have a family history of immune problems? Should they be getting the same dosage at the same frequency? Where are the studies looking into this?

A really great site that delves much deeper into this question about vaccine safety studies is Fourteen Studies. It looks into vaccine safety studies that have been done but contends that the studies did not ask the right questions. Therefore the results are useless not one study has been done asking do vaccines cause autism. The biggest issue is there have been no studies comparing vaccinated kids with unvaccinated kids.

Our Vaccination Strategy
With Tristan we were new parents and had heard of some of the vaccine controversy but had done a little research, so we where pretty much ignorant about all the issues I’ve addressed in my posts. So we decided to vaccinate him on schedule, with a few exceptions. He didn’t get the chicken pox vaccine, flu shot or the second measles mumps and rubella vaccine. Tristan’s regression seems to have started between 12 and 15 months. He received his MMR at 12 months and he received his last vaccine at 15 months. Obviously we’ll never know if a vaccine caused Tristan to have autism but I believe it didn’t help. For this reason we delayed Maya’s shots by about a month, she will not get MMR, chicken pox, flu shot or the new HPV shot. I’m not sure when we will vaccinate the kids for MMR.

As you can see I’m definitely not anti-vaccine. I believe vaccines are extremely important. But I also think the medical community needs to be less cavalier with our children’s well being when it comes to immunizing. Vaccines can’t be one size fits all because every kid is different, different size, different immune response, and different detoxification systems. More studies need to be conducted on the preservatives and chemicals in vaccines. To find out what the safe concentration of chemicals is in our kids, if any.

I also think the medical community needs to take a look at alternative ways to protect people from vaccines. Natural remedies in the form of naturopathy and homeopathy have been around for centuries. For the most part they are cheaper and less burdensome to the body.

At the end of the day the issue is money. Who’s going to pay for studies that could possibly put big pharmaceutical companies out of business? And why partner with the alternative medicine field that endorses a way of medicine that doesn’t necessarily promote prescription drugs?

But I wanted to take a couple minutes and quickly bring up a topic that seems to be getting quite a bit of talk lately, and that is the H1N1 influenza virus.

There is no question about the dangers in contracting any influenza virus as they can all be fatal, but the H1N1 seems to be getting a lot more attention, likely because of its ability to hit younger, healthier individuals by inducing a cytokine storm. So invariably my question is should we be worrying more about this new strain of influenza over the normal seasonal strain we see every flu season?

According to the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control there have been 5938 worldwide deaths linked to the H1N1 virus this year as of October 28th, 2009. Now I’ve tried to get some up-to-date statistics on the worldwide number of deaths caused by plain old everyday flu but I couldn’t find any. However, what I did find was that as of April 30th, 2009 seasonal flu has caused over 13,000 deaths in the United States alone.

Now I’m not much of a mathematician, but the numbers tell me that the regular flu has killed more than twice the amount of people in half the amount of time and only in the United States which is about 4.5% of the entire global population. In case you were wondering, regular flu is responsible for somewhere between 250,000 to 500,000 worldwide deaths a year according to the World Health Organization.

Translation: for every 100 people to die from the flu, 2-4 of those deaths are attributed to the H1N1 virus.

Without a doubt, any flu virus has the potential to be dangerous, but given these numbers alone it would seem that the media might be covering this issue too much and creating more fear than they should be.

So are you going out to your local H1N1 dealer to get the vaccine? Please tell me why you are or why won’t you?