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Childhood Jabs Safe for Immune System, Report Says
Feb. 20
By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Parents worried about the 20 or so shots their babies must undergo in the United States were given a bit more reassurance on Wednesday with a report saying the immunizations do not damage the infant immune system.
A report by an independent group of specialists who advise the government found no link between the vaccinations and type I diabetes, pneumonia, meningitis or other infections.
Their report adds to a series of studies clearing vaccines of causing dangerous side-effects in children. Last year the committee found no link between the combined measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism.
"Some parents think, that with the increased numbers of vaccinations being given to children under the age of 2, is that somehow the infant immune system isn't up to it and is overwhelmed," Dr. Marie McCormick, who headed the Institute of Medicine panel, said in a telephone interview.
There were also some fears that combining vaccines might disrupt the immune system, making the infants susceptible to infections or even making it go haywire. For example, type I diabetes, also known as juvenile diabetes, is caused when the immune system, for unknown reasons, attacks and destroys insulin-producing cells in the pancreas.
But it is not the vaccines doing this, the report, written by 14 experts who reviewed many different studies, said. It said anywhere between 500,000 and 1 million Americans have type I diabetes and the incidence has not gone up with vaccination.
And studies show that babies withstand the jabs very well.
"It is a competent immune system," McCormick, chair of maternal and child health at the Harvard School of Public Health, said. "Babies have to be able to deal with bugs."
Dr. Paul Offit, a pediatrician and chief of infectious disease at Children's Hospital in Philadelphia, said a baby's immune system has a lot more to deal with than vaccines.
"When you are in the womb, you are in a sterile environment," he said in a telephone interview.
"By the end of your first week of life you have been colonized with tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of whole bacteria." The baby's immune system is responding to each of these.
The committee was unable to get enough evidence to clear vaccines of causing asthma and allergies, although McCormick and Offit believe it is unlikely there is an association.
MORE VACCINES NOW THAN EVER
It is true that babies get many more vaccinations now than their parents did. "In 1980, infants were vaccinated against four diseases -- diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis (whooping cough) and polio," the Institute, one of the National Academies of Sciences, said in a statement.
"Today, most healthy infants get up to 15 shots of five vaccines by the time they are six months old, and up to five additional shots of seven more vaccines by age two."
They protect against hepatitis B, diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, polio, measles, mumps, rubella (German measles), Haemophilus influenzae -- a bacteria that can cause meningitis -- chickenpox and pneumococcus.
"We know that 25 percent of parents think there are too many being given," McCormick said, citing a survey done in 2000. But she said in fact the vaccines are now more carefully targeted and babies receive fewer antigens -- the proteins that activate the immune system -- than they did in older shots.
Offit said having to cope with a mere dozen vaccines is nothing in comparison to what a baby copes with in breathing dust and eating food that, even when it is not considered contaminated, is swarming with microbes. "To say it is a drop in the ocean is to overestimate the amount of antigens in vaccines," he said.
People are also mistrustful because several vaccines were recently pulled off the market, including those that contained the mercury-based preservative thimerosol and a rotavirus vaccine that protects against diarrhea but which was linked with intestinal problems.
"This sort of rapid change in policy raises people's concerns," McCormick said.
But she said parents living in the early 21st century have to remember how awful some of these diseases are.
"These are not nice diseases. These are bad diseases," she said. Diphtheria, whooping cough and tetanus can kill, as can measles. Meningitis is deadly and crippling.
Measles can cause encephalitis and a long-term condition that causes children to become demented in adolescence, known as subacute sclerosing panencephalitis. Even chickenpox can have deadly side-effects.
