Vaccination Update

Pharmaceutical companies might lose out if common sense held sway

by Doug Collins

Mumps

On April 14, 2006 the Associated Press, regarding an outbreak of more than 600 cases of mumps in the US Midwest, reported that "no deaths have been reported from the current epidemic."

This is not surprising, given that mumps is generally a very mild disease, especially in kids. For this reason, it's likely that many cases in the same epidemic likely went unreported.

On the other hand, mumps can occasionally "go down" on post-adolescents, causing testicular or ovarian infection. That's a bit disturbing, especially since the AP report also mentioned that "a large portion of those with mumps are college-age and few are school-age or preschool children. Health officials said that's likely because of the very high vaccination rates among children."

But the assertion of the health officials makes little sense. The college-aged have likely just as high a vaccination rate as the children for mumps, because the mumps shot has been on the federal vaccination schedule for decades. A more likely reason that college-aged people would contract mumps is that vaccinated immunity of all types statistically tends to wane over time. Unfortunately, this fact leaves post-adolescents-who are at a somewhat greater risk of complications of mumps-more prone to get the disease.

Would it then possibly be a better public health measure to simply encourage pre-adolescent children to catch mumps, when the risks of complications are indeed miniscule, thereby granting them lifelong immunity from another mumps infection? This would seem to make more sense when you figure that the long-term side effects of childhood vaccines are not typically assessed by our federal regulatory apparatus, and that the mumps vaccine has been associated with meningitis in research done in both Canada and Japan, not to mention associations with other side-effects (see The Vaccine Guide by Neustaedter).

But then again, if there were non-vaccine solutions to public health, there would be no profits for the pharmaceutical companies!

Polio and refined sugar

Though polio was once a scourge in the developed world, there hasn't been a single natural case of it in the western hemisphere for decades. That might be reason enough to skip the vaccine, but I came across the following interesting information regarding refined sugar and polio. It would explain why polio became such a problem in the 20th century, the same century in which refined sugar became widely available to those in the developed world.

The abstract of an article in the journal Medical Hypotheses (March, 1992;37(3):171-8) states:

"Polio outbreaks are associated with the consumption of refined sugar. According to one researcher, a substance produced during the sugar refining process, such as deoxysugars, may be responsible for polio. Further, poliovirus may be present in a population but may not occur unless large quantities of refined sugar are consumed.

Polio is often described as a 'disease of the fit and well-fed,' and at one time shifted from a sporadic disease to an epidemic disease. According to the researcher, sugar consumption can explain both anomalies. People who are well-nourished are more likely to eat sugar-rich diets, and the shift from a sporadic to an epidemic disease corresponds to the global increase in consumption of refined sugar."

As early as 1951, Benjamin Sandler, MD, as well as other doctors, noticed a correlation between polio and refined sugar consumption, both in humans and in animal experimentation. You can read an article by Sandler at www.mercola.com/article/sugar/polio_sugar.htm .

As a public health policy for polio, it would possibly make more sense to simply discourage consumption of refined sugar. But again, there's not much in that for the pharmaceutical companies, and the processed-foods industry would certainly throw a fit. It's ironic that for years-at least when I was a kid-the polio vaccine was given via a cube of white sugar. Perhaps kind of like swallowing the cause and the cure at the same time!

HPV vaccine for girls

The US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) recently voted to include three HPV shots in the mandatory immunization schedule for girls, starting at age nine. Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) is what causes genital warts, which sometimes lead to cervical cancer. It is only transmissable via sexual contact. The vaccine would ostensibly lower the number of cases of cervical cancer.

Various critics of the new policy, including the National Vaccination Information Center and the magazine Mothering, point out that cervical cancer is one of the most easily detectable and treatable cancers in women, and that basically the only way a female can die of cervical cancer is to refuse to get pap smears.

Besides, it seems somewhat ridiculous to mandate the jabbing of nine-year-old girls for this, who are at an extremely low risk of infection by sexual contact.

The safety test that the CDC is basing its decision on involved a test group of only 100 girls, which seems fairly scant. Such safety tests also do not assess the ongoing, increasing body burden caused by still more and more vaccines being required for kids.

Mercury in vaccines

The Washington state legislature passed a bill last session which bans anything more than trace amounts of mercury in vaccines given to kids and pregnant women. Up to now, flu shots in Washington and most states have still contained significant amounts of mercury. Mercury has in recent years been phased out of other vaccines given to children. Perhaps not coincidentally, for the first time in many years the rate of newly diagnosed cases of autism declined last year.

Robert F Kennedy, Jr has personally taken up the cause of mercury in vaccines and has attracted public notice to the mercury/autism connection. In a recent article by Kennedy in Rolling Stone, he quotes school nurse Patti White, who testified to the House Government Reform Committee:

"Vaccines are supposed to be making us healthier; however, in twenty-five years of nursing I have never seen so many damaged, sick kids. Something very, very wrong is happening to our children."

( www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/7395411/deadly_immunity .)