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A Difficult Decision.
Like most parents we want to do what’s best for our children and until their are credible studies demonstrating that vaccinated children are "HEALTHIER" than unvaccinated children we will not be vaccinating our children.The World Health Organisation describes health as
However the WHOs main priority seems to be the eradication of infectious diseases using vaccinatins rather promoting policies to change the conditions that predispose children to comlications from these diseases. Unfortunatly for many, vaccination is the most cost effective method for reducing incidence of infectious disease particularly in the third world where side effects are not recorded.
There is no doubt that "absence of disease" through immunisation is extemly important for impoverished imuno-suppressed children in the third world. Vaccination programmes are only a short term solution for third world health, they have been introduced with great effect in countries like Cuba in1960. However reducing inequality, access to clean water, good nutrition, sanatation and better housing should be the goals for all those countries where children are vulnerablel to infections like measles. It is unfortunate the western world spends more time trying to sell patent protected drugs to these people, at prices they could not possibly afford, than helping prevent the conditions that make them vulnerable in the first place.
Most medical research seeks proximate explanations about how parts of the body works or how disease disrupts this function. Perhaps the questions they should be asking is why our bodies have evolved defences to counter the threats of infectious diseases. There is a perpetual battle between humans and pathogens, a kind of evolutionary arms race, in which humans use natural selection to stay ahead of the bugs. This endless escalating arms race is why humans can never entirely eradicate infectious diseases, trying to so artificially with vaccinations, may be causing the huge increase in autoimmune disorders and giving other opportunistic infections a chance to thrive in compromised hosts.
Incidence of infectious diseases can be reduced through immunisation programmes. This is regarded as one of the most cost-effective interventions within the public health boards reach. However it is also recognised that no vaccine is completely safe or protective for all individuals. Differences in the way different peoples' immune systems react to a vaccine account for occasions when people are not protected following immunization or when they experience side-effects. As infectious diseases continue to decline, people have become increasingly concerned about the risks associated with vaccines. Families like us are beggining to ask questions about these vaccines and whether the vaccine or the disease contribute most to the development of the immune system and good health.
When you get sick, your body makes antibodies to fight the disease and help you get better. These antibodies stay in your body, even after the disease has gone, and protect you from getting the same illness again. This is called natural immunity. Babies, used to be immune to many diseases because they had antibodies which had been passed on from their mothers and maintained by breast feeding. Sadly maternal immunity has been in decline for years because mothers have never been exposed to the infectious diseases their mothers were.
Vaccines trick the body into believing it has had the disease, the imune system responds to the vaccine by producing antibodies which should remain in the body as if your child is exposed to the actual disease, the the result being protection from any future exposure. Sounds simple enough but it does not and there are other chemicals in vaccination used to preserve and adjuvants to stimulate the immune reponse which cause adverse reactions in some children somtimes with disasterous consequences.
Before deciding on vaccination we reserached the following areas.
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Disease incidence and the likelihood of exposure
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Severity and possible complications of the disease
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Looked at the risks from the disease with the risks from the vaccine
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Natural selection, and how our relatives had reacted to infectious diseases.
When we decided not to vaccinate we considered the following a positive health approach to deal with infectious disease.
1. Janette entered pregnancy making sure she was extremely healthy .
2. She exclusively breastfeed for six months and continued breastfeeding for twelve months.
3. Our family allways eat good quality fresh food, organic whenever possible.
4. We kept the child within the family circle for the first year. This was not posible with Eloise and she contracted Whooping cough from Molly just after being born, with no problems.
5. We never prevent the children from exploring dirt, but be mindfull of cuts and tetanus infection which can be serious, they dont do single Tetanus so if your young child is badly cut and your are considering the vaccine the only tetanus vaccine available to under 7s in the UK is the combined five in one.
6. We have allowed our healthy children to catch childhood infections after they were one year old. They have had chicken pox, rubella, and whooping cough.
7. If they had not had Rubella by 15 years of age they would have been vaccinated against it.
8.Our family see a temperature as the immune systems way of fighting disease. They have had tempertures of 104 and have never had medicine. For sick stomachs we give a glass of coke, bacteria do not like coke I am told, the children dont like it much.
9. Make sure the children do not come into contact with the poo of a child that has recently had a live Polio vaccination.
10 Stay away from third world countries for the time being. I have traveled in Africa, Asia. I did have a polio on sugar cube and BCG when I was a child. Would we give these to our children?? Depends on their travel plans and their age.
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