Home › Forums › Costa Rica Living Forum › Child Immunization in CR
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August 17, 2007 at 12:00 am #186155mbrydenthalMember
We have two children…..3 & 5
We have been to CR a few times with them….My wife is against most immunization shots for children…
Our next trip to CR will be for an extended 4 months stay and we will be visiting Nicaragua (San Juan Del Sur) for 4 days…..
The only shots they have gotten are the DIP/TET…due to cases of whooping cough being active where we live…
My question….
Should we re-evaluate getting certain immunizations for the children because of an increased risk in CR / Nicaragua?? (polio, hep)….We have spoken with our doctors and they push the immunizations regardless….
August 17, 2007 at 6:56 pm #186156DavidCMurrayParticipantMatt, if I were you, I’d be posing these questions to my local health department. They have access to the most current advice from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization about what immunizations are advised. I don’t believe you’ll find better advice anywhere . . . certainly not in this forum.
At your local health department, too, there should be a knowledgeable physician or nurse who can also talk to you and your wife about your specific concerns about childhood immunization. There is no room for dispute. Childhood immunization has prevented many, many more unnecessary deaths and illnesses than adverse side effects. That is not diminish your wife’s concerns. One question I would be sure to ask is the incidence of adverse effects on children the ages of yours. You might learn that those side effects occur primarily among infants. I would want to know.
August 19, 2007 at 4:56 pm #186157AndrewKeymasterI don’t think the non-pharma sponsored facts/medical professionals would agree with you David. There is a HUGE amount of research showing how dangerous many vaccines are and the HUGE increases in autism levels in the US has been blamed by many non-pharma sponsored medical professionals on vaccinations.
I would love to see a study of the autism and general sickness levels of US multi-vaccinated children versus Costa Rica children who probably don’t receive 5% of what a US baby is pumped full of …
As it stands, recent studies showed the USA at #42 for overall life expectancy so I’m not sure if it’s a good idea to listen their advice at all…
Scott Oliver – Founder
WeLoveCostaRica.comAugust 19, 2007 at 6:50 pm #186158maravillaMemberI couldn’t agree with you more, Scott. If I had a child now, I would make sure they received NO vaccinations at all. They are still putting mercury in some flu vaccines, which many people believe is responsible for the 500% increase in autism in the U.S. I was shocked to learn that kids today get vaccinated for chicken pox, mumps, and measles, all of which I had and survived very well. What the heck is your immune system for anyway if it doesn’t get a chance to work properly. America is the sickest and fattest nation on the planet, and we take more medications than any other country, while 100,000 people a year die JUST from taking these medications. In any report advocating the use of vaccines, it is imperative to find out WHO authored the report. Oftentimes it’s someone at Big Pharma, pushing their product.
August 20, 2007 at 11:37 pm #186159kotyMemberIf you check the research you will see that child immunizations have saved many more children than they have hurt. There is actually no scientific evidence that immunizations cause autism. Not getting immunized definately does increase chances of getting rubella, polio etc. The fact is, most of the anecdotal accounts of autism caused by vaccinations is a coincidence of timing of the vaccine and when autism strikes young children. If you actually go back and read these accounts (which I have done, being in the field of autism)there were many signs of autism prior to the vaccine being administered. Go by the facts, no just what someone’s opinion is. By the way, my 5 year old just had his well child check for kindergarten today. He received all the boosters and also a first shot for Hep A (recommended because we frequently travel to Costa Rica and Central America where this is a threat). I feel confident that he will not be at risk for getting many of the diseases that other children get. Ask anyone who was around before the polio vaccine was available what they think about vaccines. Also, I am not into giving my child unnecesaary drugs and we are organic and antibiotic/hormone -free at my house. We just recently had an outbreak of measles last winter in my area of the country, basically because many of the immigrants are not vaccinated against this. Glad my child is protected.
Koty
August 21, 2007 at 11:29 am #186160AndrewKeymasterCheck ‘who’s’ research exactly? The research from the pharmaceutical companies? And we can really trust their ‘facts’ right? They don’t have any agenda at all? There’s never been a case where they have adjusted the ‘facts’ to get FDA approvals or anything?
And there’s no connection between smoking cigarettes and lung cancer? That’s what the tobacco companies told us for years…
“Currently, CDC recommends vaccination against 12 vaccine-preventable diseases. Because some of these vaccines have to be administered more than once, a child may receive up to 23 shots by the time he or she is 2 years of age. Depending on the timing, a child might receive up to six shots during one visit to the doctor.”
The drug companies are NOT in the business of disease prevention, they are in the business of making money by selling drugs and you know as well as I do that if they had an opportunity to vaccinate our babies against 500 different diseases, they would be doing it.
Do we really think that we are that smart that we can out think Mother Nature? Common sense tells us that if we pump our little babies full of 23 different doses of vaccines by the time they are 2 years old we’re going to see some serious problems?
Scott Oliver – Founder
WeLoveCostaRica.comAugust 21, 2007 at 1:38 pm #186161maravillaMemberThis is tantamount to the plastics industry telling us that plastics are okay if we consume them. O-KAY! Yeah, sure! Follow the research and you find all kinds of financial connections between the government agencies and the plastics industry, both of whom are promoting any number of dangerous products. It’s merely a coincidence that there is a 500% increase in autism in the last 20 years since they started shooting kids with all kinds of vaccines? I don’t buy it because I’ve already been down the pharmaceutical litigation path and I know for a fact that the FDA and Big Pharma are bed partners, and the data are arranged any way they want to produce a specific result, and lying is the thing they do best. I was told recently that I should have the Shingles vaccine because I had had chicken pox as a child. My doctor insisted that I needed this unproven, $250 shot. Everyone I know has had chicken pox and not one of those people has had shingles, so this is yet another scare tactic. I would agree that the polio vaccine (although there are emerging problems with that even) and smallpox may be necessary, but I have my doubts about the rest. And if any governmental agency tells me something is safe, effective, and necessary, my knee-jerk reaction is that there is a financial connection somewhere that is responsible for that particular platform.
August 21, 2007 at 5:42 pm #186162mbrydenthalMemberThanks for all your posts….
I think at minimim we will get the Hepetitis A vaccine….
Now that the kids are older we feel a little safer about the vaccine….I did not mean to start a vacination conspiracy theory war….
But I did learn two things from all the replys….
“No matter which side you are on, you can find the BS to back it”
“Dont read everything that you believe”http://www.MattBrydenthal.com
http://www.mdtravelhealth.com/destinations/mamerica_carib/costa_rica.htmlAugust 21, 2007 at 6:30 pm #186163DavidCMurrayParticipantIt’s important to distinguish between data associations and causal links in discussions like this. Children have been receiving vaccinations for a number of diseases for far longer than twenty years, and yet the upsurge in autism is said (above) to have occured in just that time. Is there a causal link? I dunno.
The increase in diagnosis of autism parallels fairly closely the increase in the use of disposable diapers. There’s an association there, too, but is there a causal link? I dunno.
Nevertheless, Koty has it right. Many more childhood deaths and disabilities have been prevented by childhood vaccination than can attributed to it. And, other than the supposed causal link with autism, what other harm has childhood vaccination done?
Maybe we just don’t know yet . . .
August 22, 2007 at 3:06 pm #186164maravillaMemberAre they putting mercury in disposable diapers?? They didn’t always use mercury as a preservative in the vaccinations. That is a relatively new advent in the disease prevention scheme, and does, in fact, coincide with the sudden rise of autism. If you need a HazMat unit to come to your house to clean up a broken compact fluorescent lighbulb because of the mercury contained therein, why would putting mercury in your child’s vaccinations be okay? This is jsut another example of profit over the safety of our citizens. There have been a couple of incidents that I heard of lately where a soldier who received the smallpox vaccination caused the woman he was having sex with to develop lesions. Another incident was where the child of a recently-vaccinated military man also developed lesions. The CDC said this is rare. Yeah yeah yeah, they always say that.
August 22, 2007 at 7:51 pm #186165DavidCMurrayParticipantBut Maravilla, you (or someone) must first establish a causal link between mercury and autism for this argument to be credible. I’m not talking about coincidence, I’m talking about demonstrable fact. Do you know anyone who can speak in scientific terms to the actual effect mercury has on the human body that causes autism? If yes, please cite your sources.
There is also a coincidence between the increased diagnosis of autism (not to be confused with an increase in the actual incidence of the condition) in the past twenty years and the emergence of rap music which, to the best of my knowledge, has always been mercury-free. That doesn’t mean that there is causation there either.
It’s important to bear in mind that autism has, in the past, been misdiagnosed as mental retardation. I think Koty will bear me out when I assert that the two have some features in common which might cause some confusion in the minds of diagnosticians. So the data is cloudy.
Edited on Aug 22, 2007 14:52
August 22, 2007 at 9:59 pm #186166AlfredMemberIf they ever find a vaccine for AIDS, do you think almost everyone in Africa will jump on board to get it? I do.
You have to weigh the benefits against the negative aspects of any medicine.
Profits are a major part of drug company motives. We all can agree on that. But positive results also make a company profitable. Good drugs are out there, and not all researchers are putting profit above health.August 23, 2007 at 11:02 am #186167DavidCMurrayParticipantTwo new insights:
First, on last night’s Colbert Report on the Comedy Central channel, the editor, an actual scientist, of Skepticism magazine, a legitimate scientific journal, mentioned in passing that mercury was removed from vaccines in 1991. So any incident of autism reported after that time cannot be attributed to mercury in vaccines. This program will be repeated tonight at 7:30pm eastern time.
Second (get ready), in 1979 I attended every meeting of the Michigan State Board of Education in my role as staff to the Michigan Nutrition Commission. We were advocating school meals programs.
During the public comments period at each of those meetings, members of groups advocating the recognition of autism as a disability which should be covered by Special Education services in the schools made their case to the Board. At that time, Michigan did not recognize autism as a qualifying condition for Special Ed. The same is probably true for many other states.
The effect of that lack of recognition of autism was to deny Special Education services to the affected children, so there was an incentive on the parts of families (whose children clearly needed special services) and the local school systems to diagnose autistic children as mentally retarded, brain damaged, etc. That way, they could be brought into the Special Education system through the back door.
Autism went underreported.
But when the State Department of Education finally did recognize autism as a condition which qualified children for Special Education, autistic children could be properly diagnosed and those diagnoses could finally be properly reported. And guess what? The reported incidence of autism went way, way up.
Was there an actual increase in the number of autistic children? You cannot tell from the data.
Was the increase in the number of cases of autism reported attributable to the presence of mercury in vaccines (which indisputably was the case in the 1980s)? You cannot assert so from this data.
Are there more autistic children per 100,000 today than there were thirty years ago? Who knows?
August 23, 2007 at 1:47 pm #186168maravillaMemberNow I have to doubt the credibility of anything on Comedy Central (as IF I even watch it) because thimerisol was not removed from vaccinations (with the exception of flu vaccines and “some” immunizations) until 1999, not 1991. And the incidents of autism went down after 1999.
August 23, 2007 at 3:08 pm #186169DavidCMurrayParticipantWell, you’re missing the best (admittedly liberal) political satire on television this side of The Simpsons if you’re not watching The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, but you have every right to be suspicious. That said, last night John Stewart did have Barack Obama on for about fifteen minutes, so you have his credibility to weigh as well.
Still, we’ve heard nothing about the causal link between childhood immunizations (laced with mercury or otherwise) and autism, and we’ve heard nothing that clarifies whether the data is good or flawed.
What’s more, drifting back to the original issue, if the mercury was removed from vaccines in 1999, not 1991, why should Matt’s children not be immunized today, nine years later?
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