This has been a big week for news on the “Environmental Illness” (EI) and Autoimmune Disorder fronts.
After that blatantly ignorant, one-sided, fear-mongering cover story in Time Magazine, I was pleased to see a much more balanced take in the Inquirer yesterday.
Bernadine Healy, former director of the National Institutes of Health, risked “incurring the wrath of some of my dearest colleagues” to express that opinion in U.S. News & World Report.
“Yes, vaccines are extraordinarily safe and bring huge public health benefit,” she wrote last month. “But vaccine experts tend to look at the population as a whole. . . . And population studies are not granular enough to detect individual metabolic, genetic, or immunological variation that might make some children under certain circumstances susceptible to neurological complications after vaccination.”
This is exactly right. Doctor protocols–which sadly seem to be driven by Big Pharma’s bottom line–approach patient care backwards by mandating that what is good for the whole is good for EVERY part. But just because vaccines are good for the general population doesn’t mean that every child can or should receive them. Some kids are just not able to handle vaccines without terrible adverse effects–or at least at the level and frequency of current protocols.
Geraldine Dawson, chief scientific officer of the advocacy group Autism Speaks, declared that the Poling case “shines a spotlight” on the issue of unusual sensitivities.
“We need to conduct research to better understand and identify subgroups of children who may respond poorly to vaccines,” said the former University of Washington developmental-psychology professor.
These aren’t exactly crackpots folks–these are credentialed, respected people in their fields! We’re talking about a former director of the NIH! It’s insane to keep vaccinating kids with known risk factors–in our case, numerous and severe food allergies and other auto-immune disorders–when so much points to a SERIOUS problem. Someone needs to explain the radical increase of cases of autism in the last few years:
That, they hope, would lead to screening tests to identify children who could benefit from customizing the standard vaccination schedule, which has grown from 10 shots against seven diseases in 1980 to the current 28 shots against 14 diseases, not including the annual flu shot.
It may seem crazy for me to suggest this, but if you want to get a handle on this issue, a pretty good place to start is Jenny McCarthy’s book. Yes, that’s right, THAT Jenny McCarthy:
Her book tells the story of her son’s autism diagnosis, and how she fought to not let that become a sentence. Ultimately, through hard work, a lot of money, therapy, and a radical diet, she saw her son healed from autism. (Jess and I have done a lot of the same diet things with our boys preemptively, such as going dairy, gluten, and sugar free). McCarthy has emerged as an unlikely but forceful advocate for a reasonable approach to vaccinations and autism. If you’ve seen one of her frequent appearances on Larry King, you know that she speaks for many who don’t want to do away with vaccines, but want testing (as articulated above) to screen out those who would be harmed from them.
Another place to start, especially for concerned parents, is Kenneth Bock’s book. Bock is not alone in seeing the precipitous rise in the “4 A” disorders in connection with vaccines and the general toxicity of our modern existence. 
In other news, I was intrigued by the following two stories on EI.
A group of people want the city of Santa Fe, NM to ban WiFi in public places, citing “allergic” reactions.
Researchers in Britain are making stronger connections between cellphone use and cancer.
These reports may seem like Luddite quackery to many, but despite guffaws to the contrary, expect to hear a lot more stories like these over the next few years. It’s not without reason that many people have said that cellphones (and similar wireless technology) are the greatest mass experiment in human history.
We’re the guinea pigs, folks. Remind me, how does it usually turn out for the guinea pig?
