Eideard

Doctor Allan LeReau

Pediatricians fed up with parents who refuse to vaccinate their children out of concern it can cause autism or other problems increasingly are “firing” such families from their practices, raising questions about a doctor’s responsibility to these patients.

Medical associations don’t recommend such patient bans, but the practice appears to be growing, according to vaccine researchers…

In a study of Connecticut pediatricians published last year, some 30% of 133 doctors said they had asked a family to leave their practice for vaccine refusal, and a recent survey of 909 Midwestern pediatricians found that 21% reported discharging families for the same reason…

Most pediatricians consider preventing disease through vaccines a primary goal of their job. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and AAP issue an annual recommended vaccination schedule, but some parents ask if their child’s immunizations can be pushed back or skipped altogether, pediatricians say.

It’s hard to imagine an outbreak of smallpox today. But for centuries the deadly virus wiped out entire populations. WSJ’s Christina Tsuei reports on how the discovery of vaccines (with the help of cows) eradicated the disease and led to the prevention of many other diseases.

While rates for several key inoculations in young children rose between 2009 and 2010, according to the CDC, lower immunization rates have been blamed as a factor in U.S. outbreaks of whooping cough and measles in recent years.

Parents often voice concerns about autism or that their child’s immune system may be overwhelmed by too many vaccines at once…Numerous studies since have dispelled these concerns among scientists. Rather, scientists say, it is more likely that autism symptoms begin showing up around the same age children are vaccinated…

But, parents whose primary source of medical knowledge is Mr. Stupid and Greedy who’s selling the latest spooky cure-all tome aren’t about to listen to their doctor.

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The research paper that triggered claims linking autism to the vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella was formally retracted by the Lancet, the medical journal that published it more than a decade ago.

Following a ruling last week by the General Medical Council that Dr Andrew Wakefield had breached his professional duties, the Lancet said in a statement on its website that he had made false claims in his 1998 paper and concluded: “We fully retract this paper from the published record.”

With Dr Wakefield until now able to boost his credibility by citing the Lancet paper, the journal’s action marks a symbolic step in the saga, which led many parents to refuse the MMR vaccine for their children and sparked a surge in infections and health problems…

Dr Wakefield’s subsequent calls for separate vaccines for the different infections – including an experimental product under development by a company in which he had an interest – came under sharp scrutiny as MMR vaccination rates fell sharply in some parts of the UK, and infections rose…

“The big flaw is that everyone takes the whole system on trust and if trust breaks down, everything collapses,” he said, adding that the Lancet now imposed much tougher peer review on controversial papers, withholding those judged likely to spark public misinterpretation.

How’s that for a back-asswards admission that publication was less subject to demanding standards and scrutiny in the past.

Meanwhile, we’ve had a decade of nutball non-science spin…based on what looked like approval.

Endorsing vaccines as the world’s most cost-effective public health measure, Bill and Melinda Gates say that their foundation will more than double its spending on them over the next decade, to at least $10 billion.

The change could save the lives of as many as eight million children by 2020, Mr. Gates calculated. He said he hoped his gift would inspire other charities and donor nations to do the same…

For starters, Mr. Gates wants to make sure that 90 percent of the world’s children get shots for routine childhood diseases like measles, diphtheria, whooping cough and tetanus. Right now, almost 80 percent do. But with 134 million children born each year, it is a constant struggle to keep up, and efforts can be interrupted by factors like war, natural disasters, bad roads and corrupt officials.

Then he assumes that two new vaccines against rotavirus and pneumococcal disease, which are major killers of malnourished children, are adopted as routine immunizations in most poor countries and reach 80 percent of all children by 2020.

Even in wealthy countries, the introduction of any new vaccine can be tricky because of bureaucratic and logistical delays and because unexpected rumors can spring up, like the persistent one that polio vaccine is a plot to sterilize Muslim girls…

Mr. Gates has criticized many wealthy nations for giving what he considers too little to foreign aid. On what he described as a “list of shame” in the annual letter he released this week, he noted that the United States is last on the list of 22 wealthy nations when aid is measured as a percentage of GDP.

However, Italy recently cut its foreign aid in half, which will drop it to the bottom of next year’s list, and while at Davos, Mr. Gates took a jab at Italy’s famously wealthy and vain premier, Silvio Berlusconi, telling a German newspaper, “Rich people spend a lot more money on their own problems, like baldness, than they do to fight malaria.”

Rumors in the USA are mostly confined to Republican/Libertarian cheapskates who hate to contribute to anything – including children’s health – that might diminish their personal wealth. And, of course, the religious nutball set who can come up with a different heretical plot for every day of the week.

The bad green guy eats the small blue dots activating other stuff which kills the bad guy

Instead of a dreaded injection with a needle, someday getting vaccinated against disease may be as pleasant as drinking a yogurt smoothie.

A researcher from the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine has developed a new oral vaccine using probiotics, the healthy bacteria that are found in dairy products like yogurt and cheese. He has successfully used the approach in a preclinical study to create immunity to anthrax exposure. He also is using the method to develop a breast cancer vaccine and vaccines for various infectious diseases.

This new generation vaccine has big benefits beyond eliminating the “Ouch!” factor. Delivering the vaccine to the gut — rather than injecting it into a muscle — harnesses the full power of the body’s primary immune force, which is located in the small intestine.

“This is potentially a great advance in the way we give vaccines to people,” said Mansour Mohamadzadeh, the lead author.

“You swallow the vaccine, and the bacteria colonize your intestine and start to produce the vaccine in your gut,” Mohamadzadeh said. “Then it’s quickly dispatched throughout your body. If you can activate the immune system in your gut, you get a much more powerful immune response than by injecting it. The pathogenic bacteria will be eliminated faster.”

RTFA. There’s more to come.

Terrence Barrett makes the point, “Nature isn’t used to seeing antigens injected into a muscle. The place where your immune system is designed to encounter and mount a defense against antigens is your gut.” We didn’t evolve sticking needles into ourselves.

Daylife/Reuters Pictures

When the letters and e-mails started to pour in, Dr. Paul Offit braced himself. The pediatrician and vaccine inventor is a prominent defender of childhood vaccines, tackling those who have argued that immunizations can cause autism.

His book, “Autism’s False Prophets,” takes on British researcher Dr. Andrew Wakefield, whose now-debunked 1998 study in the prestigious Lancet medical journal linked the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine to autism. It also criticizes organized groups that advise parents to avoid vaccinating their children for fear the vaccines may cause autism.

The issue is at the center of a vociferous and often vicious debate, despite the preponderance of scientific opinion in favor of vaccination.

Offit has endured hate-filled letters, death threats and even a phone call that menaced his children. However, his book was greeted with an outpouring of support from parents of children with autism who had previously remained silent.

“It’s actually been exactly the opposite of what I would have guessed,” Offit said in an interview…

Last week a special U.S. federal vaccine court ruled against three families who claimed vaccines caused autism in their children. Offit hopes the ruling, on top of dozens of scientific reports, may reassure parents whose fears about vaccines have caused a plunge in vaccination rates in developed countries.

As a result, childhood illnesses like measles are making a comeback. More than 1,300 measles cases were reported in England and Wales in 2008, and 197,000 people died globally from measles in 2007.

These numbers frustrate public health officials, who cite study after study showing no link between vaccination and autism.

Every decade there is a new rationalization against vaccination. I don’t know what possesses this particular tinfoil hat crowd other than the anti-intellectual, anti-science propaganda of fundamentalist religions.

When I was a kid, we waited through every winter’s illness season to see who died from measles, scarlet fever, whooping cough or diphtheria – just as we feared polio in the summertime. Vaccinations allow generations since to live without that fear.