Should I take my kid to the doctor if she has chicken pox?

H2Omelon man wrote:

People say to me "prove to me that vaccines are dangerous and/or ineffective". I say "prove to me that vaccines are safe and/or effective". The burden of proof must lie with the vaccines, for this is a new, radical, and unnatural medical practice. The only thing the vaccine opponents need to do to win an argument is to introduce doubt. :)

Fair enough, although I'd hesitate to call taking advantage of the body's immune mechanism "new, "radical", or "unnatural". Remember milkmaids were unknowingly inoculating themselves against smallpox long before Jenner ever got the idea.

Humor me for a second and think about it this way: Most of the vaccines we use today are for diseases that were practically endemic a century ago. If a child wasn't deliberately exposed to a killed/attenuated pathogen or protein isolate or whatever, they'd almost certainly end up getting exposed to the real thing. The "choice" then was just between likelihoods of active infection. Fortunately parents of today don't have to choose the lesser of two evils... because vaccination has been so successful. Enjoy that freedom if you want. But if too many people follow your lead, it may not last long. That's why it's frustrating to see you on here evangelizing with vague hyperlinks.

(Let me emphasize again that I'm not questioning your parenting skills, just your public health policy-setting skills)

Yes, I speak & act as a concerned parent, not as a politician or public health administrator. :)

Yes, I agree that the links I inluded are biased. I just thought I would include them, to let others interested read an alternative viewpoint. Vaccine opponents often have their own adgendas (just as vaccine manufacturers and the US goverment have theirs). I have found it very difficult to find unbiased commentary on the vaccine issue. Everything I have read seems heavily slanted one way or the other. My position is somewhere in the middle. :)

Yes, the studies indicating the effectiveness of vaccines are peer-reviewed in many cases. However, they are still subject to the expectation bias. The expectation bias is particularly severe in diseases such as chicken pox, which are diagnosed from the symptoms only. The gold standard in medical research is the double-blind placebo-controlled study. There is a control group which gets the placebo, and an experimental group which gets the vaccine, and neither the patients nor their physicians know who is in which group. But these types of studies have never been done with vaccines. If they were, and the experimental group had fewer diagnoses, then I would be willing to agree that vaccines are effective. I am willing to change my position in light of new evidence. :)

I imagine you think I overestimate the effects of the expectation bias, overestimate the dangers of vaccines, and underestimate the dangers of the illnesses. Hopefully someday the scientific data would be there to prove your view correct. I say "hopefully", because I would really love to be able to give my child a safe & effective vaccine. But, for now, my doubt remains. :)

One concern of many parents in considering the vaccine issue is public schools. The question arises, don't we have to vaccinate them in order to get them into school? The answer is, in most cases, no. But, it depends on the state. I have looked into this before, and include it here as a reference for others. Here are the details:

Currently, 20 states will give you a religious / philosophical exemption (including CA, my state). You just need to fill out a form for your child. Currently, 48 states will give you an exemption if you get a note from a doctor (and its not too hard to find one who is anti-vaccine, particularly if you look at non-allopaths). Currently, there are only 2 states which require vaccines with no exceptions to go to public school. These are West Virginia and Mississippi. I don't know about you, but when I think of the nation's leaders in public health, West Virginia & Mississippi aren't exactly two of the states which come to mind. :)

"The gold standard in medical research is the double-blind placebo-controlled study. But these types of studies have never been done with vaccines."

WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG

No vaccine makes it to licensure in the US without: phase 1 safety and dose finding studies. Phase 2 proof of efficacy studies. Anf finally, phase 3, randomized trials, either against placebo, or against an already existing vaccine (if a placebo is considered unethical).

Here's just a smattering of the placebo controlled trials of vaccines that pop up when you put in "vaccine AND placebo" into pubmed and limit it to clinical trials:

Four year efficacy of prophylactic human papillomavirus quadrivalent vaccine against low grade cervical, vulvar, and vaginal intraepithelial neoplasia and anogenital warts: randomised controlled trial.

FUTURE I/II Study Group

BMJ. 2010 Jul 20

---------------------------------

Safety of herpes zoster vaccine in the shingles prevention study: a randomized trial.

Simberkoff MS, Arbeit RD, Johnson GR, Oxman MN, Boardman KD, Williams HM, Levin MJ, Schmader KE, Gelb LD, Keay S, Neuzil K, Greenberg RN, Griffin MR, Davis LE, Morrison VA, Annunziato PW; Shingles Prevention Study Group.

Ann Intern Med. 2010 May 4

INTERVENTION: Single dose of herpes zoster vaccine or placebo

(my institution was one of the sites for this study, we still are following some of the patients)

---------------------------------------------

Safety, efficacy, and immunogenicity of an inactivated influenza vaccine in healthy adults: a randomized, placebo-controlled trial over two influenza seasons.

Jackson LA, Gaglani MJ, Keyserling HL, Balser J, Bouveret N, Fries L, Treanor JJ.

BMC Infect Dis. 2010 Mar 17

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Safety and immunogenicity of trivalent inactivated influenza vaccine in infants: a randomized double-blind placebo-controlled study.

Englund JA, Walter E, Black S, Blatter M, Nyberg J, Ruben FL, Decker MD; GRC28 Study Team.

Pediatr Infect Dis J. 2010 Feb

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That's from the first page or 2, I don't have time or energy to comb through all 1,644 results for you.

Again, some amazing research you've done on the subject. If you can't even find a type of study, which you acknowledge is the gold standard, and declare that they have "never been done," perhaps you should look at your other conclusions a bit more critically? How about I do some similar research on physics, and declare "that there has never been a witnessed flight of a heavier than air machine?"

I can't explain what is wrong with all 2000 studies at one time. So, I will take one, say this one

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19934787

, and explain what is wrong with it. If this doesn't doesn't satisfy you, please find another specific study, and I'll be happy to discuss that one with you instead. :)

In this study, it was double-blind, however they were not measuring the effectiveness of the vaccine, hence I don't think this is a true counter-example to my claim. What they did instead was inject the experimental group with the vaccine and then measured antibody formation. And of course, the experimental group always shows production of antibodies. But an idiot can see that would happen. You inject foreign particles in the blood...your body will mount a response to them. What that means about you actually getting a disease later on is nothing. Antibodies do not correlate with HEALTH. They simply don't. I would want them to measure the rate of disease incidence instead. That is the only true way to measure the effectiveness of a vaccine.

Understand?

H2Omelon man wrote:

Antibodies do not correlate with HEALTH. They simply don't. I would want them to measure the rate of disease incidence instead.

The direct inverse relationship between antibody titers and susceptibility to the corresponding disease is one of the most fundamental facts of immunology. Surely you can see the practical and/or ethical barriers to performing the sort of study you suggest? Take polio for example. How large a sample size do you suppose it would take to elicit statistical significance for a disease with <1% incidence? That's a lot of kids getting placebos. And the best science that we have suggests some of those kids would get seriously sick. Not a risk any responsible researcher would take.

You're clearly trying to do your homework but setting impossible standards of evidence is one of the sillier ideas you've picked up from the anti-vaccine crowd.

H2Omelon man wrote:

People say to me "prove to me that vaccines are dangerous and/or ineffective". I say "prove to me that vaccines are safe and/or effective". The burden of proof must lie with the vaccines, for this is a new, radical, and unnatural medical practice. The only thing the vaccine opponents need to do to win an argument is to introduce doubt. :)

You are treading a dangerous ground.

Those idiots, like dd, have been trained to mislead you.

The best course of action, is to realize THEY ARE IDIOTS and not talk to them.

Being in association with them can and will make you crazy and will make you do stupid things.

I don't think I am setting an "impossible standard". Really this is just the standard put forth in the medical school textbooks. Nevertheless, I agree that doing a study like that on polio today would be tough. The best time to do it, clearly, is before the vaccine is released to the general public. Then there would be less of an ethical problem, since the vaccine hadn't been available to anyone up to that point. I have really enjoyed this discussion with dd & you (moderately informed). I hope that all who have read it are now more clear about the fundamental issues in the vaccination debate. :)Oh, and most importantly, my daughter has completely recovered from chicken pox, roseola, or whatever she had. This afterall, was what this thread was originally about. :)

moderately informed wrote:

The direct inverse relationship between antibody titers and susceptibility to the corresponding disease is one of the most fundamental facts of immunology. Surely you can see the practical and/or ethical barriers to performing the sort of study you suggest? Take polio for example. How large a sample size do you suppose it would take to elicit statistical significance for a disease with <1% incidence? That's a lot of kids getting placebos. And the best science that we have suggests some of those kids would get seriously sick. Not a risk any responsible researcher would take.

You're clearly trying to do your homework but setting impossible standards of evidence is one of the sillier ideas you've picked up from the anti-vaccine crowd.

OK, I'll bite. Slow day here.

First: I find it interesting that you first stated that there were no placebo controlled trials involving vaccines. Now that I've pointed out several, your argument is that they are using a surrogate endpoint, instead of a clinical endpoint. Fine, easily addressed, but a bit of intellectual honesty would be nice (i.e., oh, I guess these studies do exist, sorry for saying the exact opposite, and pretending it was a fact).

Second: As someone else pointed out, antibody levels correlate extremely well with disease protection, albeit not for all diseases. So using antibody levels as a surrogate outcome is considered quite acceptable, since it makes studies more feasible and a lot cheaper, but you apparantly don't want to believe the scientific community, so we can go to clinically relevant outcomes.

So, here is one. Not from the original 4 I posted, since they were only examples of placebo controlled trials involving vaccines; since you were just contesting their existence, I didn't know you would have other criteria for them.

It's the Shingles prevention study (related to one of the other 4 I posted), a large, well-designed, well run trial. The outcome is incidence of herpes zoster. No lab test, no surrogate, but the actual disease the vaccine is designed to protect against.

The full abstract is below, and a link although it may not work since I had to log on through my institution, but to sum up the incidence of zoster was 11.12 per 1000 person-years in the placebo group versus 5.42 per 1000 person-years in the vaccine group (P<0.001).

If you don't like incidence per 1000 person years it was 315 cases out 19,270 vaccine recipients, compared to 827 out of 19,276 placebo recipients (1.6% vs 4.3%).

Understand?

http://www.nejm.org.floyd.lib.umn.edu/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJMoa051016

N Engl J Med. 2005 Jun 2;352(22):2271-84.

A vaccine to prevent herpes zoster and postherpetic neuralgia in older adults.

Oxman MN, et al.

Shingles Prevention Study (Mail code 111F-1), VA San Diego Healthcare System, 3350 La Jolla Village Dr., San Diego, CA 92161,USA.

mnoxman@ucsd.edu

Abstract

BACKGROUND: The incidence and severity of herpes zoster and postherpetic neuralgia increase with age in association with a progressive decline in cell-mediated immunity to varicella-zoster virus (VZV). We tested the hypothesis that vaccination against VZV would decrease the incidence, severity, or both of herpes zoster and postherpetic neuralgia among older adults. METHODS: We enrolled 38,546 adults 60 years of age or older in a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial of an investigational live attenuated Oka/Merck VZV vaccine ("zoster vaccine"). Herpes zoster was diagnosed according to clinical and laboratory criteria. The pain and discomfort associated with herpes zoster were measured repeatedly for six months. The primary end point was the burden of illness due to herpes zoster, a measure affected by the incidence, severity, and duration of the associated pain and discomfort. The secondary end point was the incidence of postherpetic neuralgia. RESULTS: More than 95 percent of the subjects continued in the study to its completion, with a median of 3.12 years of surveillance for herpes zoster. A total of 957 confirmed cases of herpes zoster (315 among vaccine recipients and 642 among placebo recipients) and 107 cases of postherpetic neuralgia (27 among vaccine recipients and 80 among placebo recipients) were included in the efficacy analysis. The use of the zoster vaccine reduced the burden of illness due to herpes zoster by 61.1 percent (P<0.001), reduced the incidence of postherpetic neuralgia by 66.5 percent (P<0.001), and reduced the incidence of herpes zoster by 51.3 percent (P<0.001). Reactions at the injection site were more frequent among vaccine recipients but were generally mild. CONCLUSIONS: The zoster vaccine markedly reduced morbidity from herpes zoster and postherpetic neuralgia among older adults. Copyright 2005 Massachusetts Medical Society.

Oops, took the wrong number out of the table. Apologies. Not 827 cases (that was the number of suspected cases) in the placebo group; but rather 642. So the actual percentage is 1.6% vs 3.3% (not 4.3).

Finding is the same: the vaccine group has lower incidence of the disease. Let me know what fatal flaw this study has...

H2Omelon man wrote:

Oh, and most importantly, my daughter has completely recovered from chicken pox, roseola, or whatever she had. This afterall, was what this thread was originally about. :)

Glad to hear. I really didn't intend to drag this thread off-topic with my first question, but these things happen. Hope your kid stays healthy whatever you choose. I just hope you'll use some critical thinking about where you're getting your information from; the evidence is a lot better than some would have you believe.

This is good stuff. I love how every time someone proves you wrong, you change your story. Let's face it, you trust Jenny McCarthy types more than scientists, which says a lot

dd -

To address your first point, sorry, I guess I was getting sloppy, and typing fast. I guess what I wanted to say is that I don’t think there are any double-blind placebo-controlled studies showing vaccines to be safe & effective. The reason why is because I recall I spent some time searching a couple years back, and couldn’t find any (that was while my wife was pregnant - that seemed to be a good time to study the topic). And so, since that is what I really meant, that is why I didn’t accept that first study I mentioned, with what you have referred to as a “surrogate endpoint” (recall that I am a physicist, not an MD, so am not too familiar with some of your technical jargon).

That shingles prevention study, I must say, looks a lot better, and disproves my claim regarding the double-blind placebo-controlled studies not showing effectiveness. The safety question wasn’t addressed. But from its design, I can’t find much fault with it besides that. However, I just have the abstract, and so don’t know the details. One question I’d like to have answered is: what was the placebo? Was it truly an inert substance?

So their results are statistically significant, but, as an MD, would you consider them clinically significant? I mean, we are really talking about a pretty rare illness here, and we are talking about a 60% reduction. I would hope that most vaccines would be more effective than that. I think that a 60% reduction could likely be achieved, more safely, by strengthening one’s immune system by adopting healthy lifestyle habits.

Studies like the shingles prevention study are hard to find, aren’t they? Do you have any more examples? I wish I could find a study like that for each vaccine on the market.

So this vaccine has now been approved in the US for the 60+ age group. My parents qualify. Would I suggest my parents to get this vaccine? No, not yet, because the safety issue is still pending (long-term more than short-term).

But anyway, thanks for taking the time to find this study. I found it interesting. :-)

Laughing hard - I am a scientist. I don't accept things without proof. I question everything.

H2O-

Glad you found it interesting. As far as was the placebo inert, yes it was. Was safety addressed- it was, both in the full text of this article, and in a subsequent paper that focused on long-term safety. Not everything can make it into one paper, since they are usually fairly strict on word limits of 3-4,000 words.

As far as are those results significant clinically, as a clinician I'd say highly significant. Zoster causes fairly debilitating pain in a large proportion of people, and there are other complications such as encephalitis (I have a guy with that in the hospital right now). And I would say 3.3% incidence in the unvaccinated group is not rare, especially in a 3 year period.

As far as such studies being rare, and hard to find, no, they really are not. And I don't mean to sound too negative, but really the fact that you couldn't find this speaks to either lack of effort or lack of knowing how to go about looking for evidence. If you walked into the library at any university and asked the librarian for a few minutes of help, they would find this. It's not like it was hidden, the New England Journal is the premier medical journal in the US, if not the world, and their site is searchable (nejm.org).

Other similar studies do exist, and again, the fact that you did not find them says more about the effort/search strategy, versus the studies not existing. Here is just a sample:

N Engl J Med. 2003 Oct 2;349(14):1341-8.

A trial of a 9-valent pneumococcal conjugate vaccine in children with and those without HIV infection.

Klugman KP, Madhi SA, Huebner RE, Kohberger R, Mbelle N, Pierce N; Vaccine Trialists Group.

Medical Research Council, University of the Witwatersrand, National Institute for Communicable Diseases, Respiratory and Meningeal Pathogens Research Unit, Johannesburg, South Africa.

kklugma@sph.emory.edu

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Acute respiratory tract infections caused by Streptococcus pneumoniae are a leading cause of morbidity and mortality in young children. We evaluated the efficacy of a 9-valent pneumococcal conjugate vaccine in a randomized, double-blind study in Soweto, South Africa. METHODS: At 6, 10, and 14 weeks of age, 19,922 children received the 9-valent pneumococcal polysaccharide vaccine conjugated to a noncatalytic cross-reacting mutant of diphtheria toxin (CRM197), and 19,914 received placebo. All children received Haemophilus influenzae type b conjugate vaccine. Efficacy and safety were analyzed according to the intention-to-treat principle. RESULTS: Among children without human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection, the vaccine reduced the incidence of a first episode of invasive pneumococcal disease due to serotypes included in the vaccine by 83 percent (95 percent confidence interval, 39 to 97; 17 cases among controls and 3 among vaccine recipients). Among HIV-infected children, the efficacy was 65 percent (95 percent confidence interval, 24 to 86; 26 and 9 cases, respectively). Among children without HIV infection, the vaccine reduced the incidence of first episodes of radiologically confirmed alveolar consolidation by 20 percent (95 percent confidence interval, 2 to 35; 212 cases in the control group and 169 in the vaccinated group) in the intention-to-treat analysis and by 25 percent (95 percent confidence interval, 4 to 41; 158 and 119 cases, respectively) in the per-protocol analysis (i.e., among fully vaccinated children). The incidence of invasive pneumococcal disease caused by penicillin-resistant strains was reduced by 67 percent (95 percent confidence interval, 19 to 88; 21 cases in the control group and 7 in the vaccinated group), and that caused by strains resistant to trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole was reduced by 56 percent (95 percent confidence interval, 16 to 78; 32 and 14 cases, respectively). CONCLUSIONS: Vaccination with a 9-valent pneumococcal conjugate vaccine reduced the incidence of radiologically confirmed pneumonia. The vaccine also reduced the incidence of vaccine-serotype and antibiotic-resistant invasive pneumococcal disease among children with and those without HIV infection. Copyright 2003 Massachusetts Medical Society

------------------------------------

Vaccine. 2009 Dec 11;28(2):345-51. Epub 2009 Oct 29.

RotaTeq, a pentavalent rotavirus vaccine: efficacy and safety among infants in Europe.

Vesikari T, Itzler R, Karvonen A, Korhonen T, Van Damme P, Behre U, Bona G, Gothefors L, Heaton PM, Dallas M, Goveia MG.

University of Tampere Medical School, Tampere, Finland.

timo.vesikari@uta.fi

Abstract

A pentavalent human-bovine reassortant oral rotavirus vaccine, RotaTeq, was evaluated among nearly 70,000 infants in the Rotavirus Efficacy and Safety Trial (REST), of which 30,523 were from Europe. All infants were followed for serious adverse events as well as hospitalizations and emergency department (ED) visits. All adverse events, health care utilization, and RVGE regardless of severity were evaluated in the clinical efficacy cohort (N=2686) in Finland. RotaTeq was 98.3% (95% CI, 90.2-100%) and 68.0% (95% CI 60.3-74.4%) efficacious against severe rotavirus gastroenteritis (RVGE) and all RVGE due to any serotype for two rotavirus seasons post-vaccination. The combined rate of hospitalizations and ED visits due to RVGE of any serotype was reduced by 94.5% (95% CI, 91.3-96.8%) for up to 2 years after vaccination. There were no statistically significant differences between RotaTeq and placebo for any of the safety outcomes. In Europe, RotaTeq was highly efficacious and well tolerated.

H2Omelon man wrote:

I don’t think there are any double-blind placebo-controlled studies showing vaccines to be safe & effective.

You do realize that all "studies" are done by the drug companies themselves and their cronies don't you?

And you are betting they've not concocted any studies to "prove" what they say?

H2Omelon man wrote:

I think that a 60% reduction could likely be achieved, more safely, by strengthening one’s immune system by adopting healthy lifestyle habits.

I think this is a very interesting point to bring up: vaccine vs. naturally strengthening the immune system. It looks like you've already done extensive ammounts of research on the subject, so could you show me the studies done to prove the effectiveness of using healthy lifestyles to improve one's immune system?

the slippery slope – Yes, I thought that the pharmaceutical companies funded the vaccine studies. However, in the shingles prevention study from UCSD, I saw no evidence of that, and so didn’t bring it up. Furthermore, if dd brings up valid-looking studies, and I immediately discount them due to their funding source, then I think that all dialogue, and all learning in this thread, would cease. Maybe dd would like to comment about the funding?

TP III –

As I mentioned earlier, it is the vaccine proponents that need to prove their new, radical, & unnatural practice. Vaccine opponents only need to introduce a little doubt. Healthy living is not new, not radical, and not unnatural. When I say “healthy living”, I am talking about living how humans have evolved to live, i.e. live in a way more similar to our ancient ancestors. I promise you that you will not find any double-blind placebo-controlled studies on healthy lifestyles. For one thing, who would fund it? For another, there is no placebo for healthy living. :)

When the science is not conclusive, I think the conservative thing to do is to behave as our ancient ancestors did, since evolution has likely molded the human being to thrive in that type of environment. For example, cell phones. The radiation is a potential threat, and humans did not evolve with cell phones. Until they are absolutely proven safe without a shadow of a doubt, I am inclined to believe that they are likely somewhat harmful, in the long run. My approach to vaccines, and nearly everything else in life, is similar. If I see a potential threat that didn’t exist in our natural environment (as I do with vaccines & cell phones), I am going to think that humans have likely not evolved the capacity to deal with it, and I am going to try to avoid it until proven safe.

Let me give you another example to clarify the distinction between natural & unnatural threats. Consider bee stings vs. vaccines. Both contain toxic chemicals. However, we evolved with bees in our environment, but not with vaccines. Hence, via evolution, I think it is likely that our bodies are better equipped to deal with the toxins in bee stings than the toxins in vaccines. For this reason, I am more worried about the potential long-term effects of getting a vaccine than the potential long-term effects of getting a bee sting. Now, there are other natural threats, like poisonous snakes, which presumably would be more harmful than a vaccine. However, I think in our natural environment poisonous snakes must have been sufficiently rare so that humans did not specifically evolve the ability to deal with them. :)

dd –

On the first study, looks pretty good, double-blind w/ placebo…again no mention of safety. I also don’t know how “invasive pneumococcal disease” was diagnosed. I wish I could read the full text of the shingles prevention study, and also the follow-up you said exists, and also this one. I would like to see the raw data, and see exactly how they did the math to reach their conclusions. :)

On the second study, I don’t see the words “double-blind” anywhere, and so I’m not going to take this one very seriously, unless you explain to me more fully why I should. I wouldn’t call it “similar” to the shingles prevention study. Even if the rotavirus vaccine were shown to be safe & effective, would I give it to my infant if I lived in the US? I don’t think so. Breastfeed & babysit instead (afterall, these are natural). From what I have read, infants who get rotavirus in the US are almost universally at daycare on formula. I have read that the odds of a breastfed baby staying at home in the US getting it in the first year (when it’s most dangerous) are slim to none.

I won't be on here over the weekend, so I'll address these various points, and then likely let this thread drift to oblivion...

Funding: Most studies have 2 potential sources: industry or government. Some rare ones get private organization funds (American cancer society, foundations, etc). Generally we love studies that go through the NIH or VA funding mechanisms, because they compete for funds based on the merits of their ideas, vs promoting a company owned drug or vaccine. However, funding for research has decreased, and costs of trails have skyrocketed, so more and more trials do have industry ties. Do we discount them? No. But we do requre that the authors verify that they are in control of the data, that they vouch for the analyses, and that the sponsor did not have veto power over results. Now all clinical trials are registered at clinicaltrials.gov, so that all of this is out there for people to know about.

Re: vaccines as new, unnatural, and radical. Well, there are variable definitions of those words. Jenner's work with varriolation (early small-pox vaccination) was in the late 1700's. Diptheria, tetanus, typhoid, all had vaccines in the early 1900's. Most of them were hardly radical ideas- it was known that organisms caused disease, and that if people survived they were immune. So, take killed or modified organism, introduce them, and see if immunity can be induced in absence of disease. Perhaps that is radical, it seems like basic science to me.

Your bee/vaccine comparison: rather funny. Anaphylaxis occurs in about 3% of bee stings; no vaccine comes anywhere near that rate.

Finally: definitions of invasive pneumococcal disease, and wanting to get full text: that's a fairly standard term, and it implies blood stream or central nervous system invasion, as defined by a positive culture. If you want full text, you'll have to go to your local library, or purchase online. But (without meaning to sound too snarky), these papers are generally written for people in the field, and sorry, from the various terms you've asked for clarification on, I honestly think you'll have trouble reading them.

You may think that your approach of only accepting things that you have fully investigated as safe is prudent, but face it, medicine is complex, and you can't possibly research this in your spare time. Again, not to be rude, but you were unaware of these studies existing, and there are hundreds of them. You also spout off facts that you've heard and accept them at face value (while somehow demanding absoulte proof for facts that don't fit your views?), such as the one about infants receiving breast milk not getting rotavirus. They do get rotavirus, we just happen to live in a resource-rich society where kids rarely die of dehydration, so it is not the fatal disease it is elsewhere, but it still leads to ER visits, admissions, and a lot of money spent.

You seem like a decent enough guy, but you mistake a bit of online reading (of dubious sources) and heresay as "research", and go on blissfully ignorant as to the real facts.

My last bit of advice: if you really do want to research things, learn how. Go to cdc.gov. the Morbidity Mortality Weekly Report is a great section to read about current infectious disease trends (http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/). Go to a local university and ask a librarian to show you how to use pubmed or medline. Or just browse old racks of medical journals and when you find an article on vaccines, go look at the reference section and go read those. Or better yet, talk to a reasonable physician who will take the time to explain the science.

I think you said you're in California- they are having a spike in pertussis cases, 400% over last year. Think about it if your child starts having a cough with a whoop...

H2Omelon man wrote:

the slippery slope – Yes, I thought that the pharmaceutical companies funded the vaccine studies. However, in the shingles prevention study from UCSD, I saw no evidence of that, and so didn’t bring it up. Furthermore, if dd brings up valid-looking studies, and I immediately discount them due to their funding source, then I think that all dialogue, and all learning in this thread, would cease. Maybe dd would like to comment about the funding?

You actually read his messages?