In early August of last year congressional hearings were held in Washington D.C. on the question of vaccine safety. Congressman Dan Burton, Chairman of the U. S. House Government Reform Committee, called the hearings.
On the weekend of October 2-3, 1999, an autism conference was held at Cherry Hill, New Jersey, sponsored by the Autism Research Institute of San Diego, California. Over 1,000 people were in attendance, the great majority of whom were parents of autistic children.
At one point in the meeting, when those parents who thought their child's autism was caused by vaccines were asked to stand, a large majority of the audience stood. With these and other indications of growing public concerns about current childhood immunization programs, it is hoped that this review will be of timely interest.
It is true that there may be situations where extreme measures may be justified, as the lesser of two evils, to preserve life and health. The basic question, therefore, is whether the benefits of current childhood vaccines outweigh the harm, or whether the reverse is true.
As to the benefits of vaccines, polio has been eliminated from the Western Hemisphere, and smallpox may have been eliminated worldwide, although there are disturbing reports it is still to be found in parts of the Far East. However, vaccine proponents would have us believe that vaccines have been largely responsible for controlling virtually all of the former epidemics of killer diseases in the U.S.
With the exceptions cited above, the facts do not bear this out. According to the records of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, from 1911 to 1935 the four leading causes of childhood deaths from infectious diseases in the U.S. were diphtheria, pertussis (whooping cough), scarlet fever, and measles.
The clear implication of this and other revelations(4) concerning a general deficiency of safety testing in the vaccine field, especially as concerns possible long-term side effects, is that adverse reactions may be taking place on a large scale without being recognized as to their true nature.
The rise of allergic disease among children in the UK over the past 30 years remains unexplained. One hypothesis is that infections in early childhood prevent allergic sensitization, and that successive generations of children have lost his protection as their exposure to infectious disease in early life has declined. Consequently the prevalence of atopy and concomitant allergic disease has risen.
Perhaps the greatest concern with vaccines today rests with their possible causal relation to the growing epidemic of childhood autism, developmental delay, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
Regarding the latter, recent news item stated that ADHD has increased from 900,000 in 1991 to nearly 5 million today.(11) Parenthetically, statistics may be open to question, but one cannot question the observations of veteran elementary school teachers who, in our experience, unanimously and emphatically report a marked increase in this disorder in recent years.
At present primary suspicion for this epidemic of neurobehavioral disorders rests with the MMR (measles-mumps-rubella) vaccine. Although scientific evidence has not yet reached the standards of scientific proof, one pioneer researcher in this area, Dr. Vijendra Singh, during his tenure with the Department of Pharmacology, University of Michigan, published the report of a study in which he found that a large majority (84%) of autistic children tested had antibodies to brain tissue in the form of antibodies to myelin basic protein.
If the MMR vaccine is causing an autoimmune reaction involving the brains of autistic children, what would be the mechanism? It has already been pointed out that one of the differences between the vaccine and the respective wild virus infections is that of entry into the body (injections versus mucosal entry).
There is another difference: whereas with the wild viruses there is serial passage through human hosts, in the case of the vaccine, the measles virus is incubated in animal culture tissue (chick embryo). Are these fundamental differences responsible for the rapidly increasing incidence of childhood autism and possibly other autoimmune disorders now being seen?
Although research in this area is in its infancy, we do know some things. As purely genetic material, viruses are highly susceptible to the process of "jumping genes," in which they may incorporate genetic material from tissue in which they are cultured.(17) The process may be further affected by the fact that protein sequences in the measles virus have been found to be similar to those found in brain tissues.(18) With the exception of the pioneering work of Dr. Singh, these are questions which remain unexplored and unanswered.
After leaving the FDA, Dr. Martin took a position as professor of pathology with the University of Southern California. There he tested blood samples from patients with chronic fatigue syndrome, autism and other nervous system disorders.
It should be admitted that this work is preliminary, and no definitive conclusions can be drawn from it, but the need for further intensive investigation should be apparent.
Overdue in the opinion of many, on June 17, 1999, U.S. government officials voted to withdraw their recommendation for the use of the live oral polio vaccine and to recommend exclusive use of the inactive (Salk) polio vaccine, because the former has been the only remaining source of polio cases, though rare, in the U.S. since 1979.
In summary, it is possible that either the MMR or the oral polio vaccines, by mechanisms described above, may induce a process of encephalitis or brain inflammation, which may be highly prevalent but as yet rarely recognized for its true nature.
With this sobering warning, made over 3 decades ago, it may sadly prove to be prophetic for what we are seeing today.
As another concept, it is highly pertinent that many of today's children are second-generation vaccines; that is, they are born to mothers previously vaccinated with the measles, mumps, and/or rubella vaccines.
It is possible the reaction rates in the second-generation vaccines may be happening on a much larger scale due to previous sensitization of mothers from their vaccines, this sensitization being transmitted in turn to the fetus during pregnancy.(23) If this process is taking place, something we cannot know until appropriate research is done, there predictably will be additional increases in autism beyond that already taking place, should the process be continued into yet another third generation.
Time may prove that vaccine programs went awry when they deviated from the most basic of all medical ethics, the right of parents to accept or reject vaccines for their children. Freedom of choice provides a system of checks and balances now lacking.
At the very least, this would provide the parents the power to compel better safety screening of vaccines. The remedy? The government should stop violating the right of informed consent, or the parents' right to accept or reject vaccines for their children based on full and uncensored disclosure of pros and cons.
Today, we have a system in which vaccine production by the pharmaceutical companies is largely self-regulated. Naturally these companies are interested in profits from their products which, in itself, is not wrong. However, when arbitrary decisions in the mandating of vaccines are made by government bureaucracies, which frequently work hand-in-glove with the pharmaceutical industry, with no recourse open to parents, we have all the potential ingredients for a tragedy of historic proportions.
Detailed case histories were taken and blood tests were done to examine various parameters of cellular and humoral immunity. It was found that children with adverse reactions had marked increases in abnormal blood parameters as compared with children who had had no reactions.
The first study of its kind as far as we are aware, perhaps the most striking and significant feature of the report is not the results of the tests, which might have been anticipated, so much as the fact that it came from a foreign country, Czechoslovakia.
American science has been foremost in the development and promotion of vaccines. That it should be laggard in basic safety testing, of which this study may represent one of the modest beginnings, is a sad reflection on the American scientific community. We expect and should demand more from American science and medicine.
1. Dublin L. Health Progress, 1936-1945. New York, Metropolitan Life Insurance Co., 1948, p. 12.
2. Biodati CJM. Immunization: History, Ethics Law and Health. Integral Aspects Inc., Windson, Ontario, 1999, pp. 104-106.
3. Stratton KR, Howe CJ, Johnston RB, Jr. (Eds). Adverse Events Associated with Childhood Vaccines: Evidence Bearing on Causality. Institute of Medicine, National Academy Press, Washington, DC, 1994, pp. 211-236.
4. Buttram HE. The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act: A Critique. The Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients, October 1998, pp. 66-68.
5. Incao P. Supporting children's health, Alternative Medicine Digest, Issue 19, pp. 54-59.
6. One survey showed a 46 percent increase in death rate nationwide from asthma between 1977 and 1991. Philadelphia Inquirer, Dec. 8, 1994, p. A22. In some areas, the incidence of asthma has increased 200 percent in the past 20 years. The Human Ecologist, National HEAL, Fall 1992, Vol. 55, No. 6.
7. Sheneen SO, et al. Measles and atopy in Guinea-Bissau. Lancet 1996;347:1792-1796.
8. Odent MR. Pertussis vaccination and asthma: Is there a link? JAMA 1994;271:229-231.
9. Alm JS, et al. Atopy in children of families with an anthroposophic lifestyle. Lancet 1999;353:1485-1488.
10. Kemp T, et al. Is infant immunization a risk factor for childhood asthma or allergy? Epidemiology 1997;8(6):678-680.
11. Jennings L. Increasing Ritalin doses in school children questioned. The Intelligencer, Sept. 21, 1998, pp. D1-D2.
12. Changes in Population of Persons with Autism and Pervasive Developmental Disorders in California's Developmental Services System: 1987-1998, a Report of the Legislature, March 1, 1999.
14.Singh V, Yang V. Serological association of measles virus and human herpes virus-6 with brain autoantibodies in autism. Clinical Immunology and Immunopathology 1998;88(l):105-108.
15. Jubelt B, Harter DH. Viral Infections in Merritt's Textbook of Neurology. Seventh edition, Lea and Febiger, Philadelphia, 1984, pp. 99-104.
16.Wakefield AJ, et al. Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children. Lancet 1998;351:637-641. 17. Kumar S, Miller LK. Effects of serial passage of Autographa California nuclear poly hedrosis virus in cell culture. Virus Research 1987;7:335-349.
18. Jahnke U, et al. Sequence homology between certain viral proteins and proteins related to encephalomyelitis and neuritis. Science 1985;29:282-284.
19. Horowitz L. Emerging Viruses, AIDS and Ebola. Tetrahedron Publishing Group, Rockport, Massachusetts, 1997, pp. 488-493.
20. Martin WJ, et al. African green monkey origin of the atypical cytopathic "stealth virus" isolated from a patient with chronic fatigue syndrome. Clinical and Diagnostic Virology 1994;4:93-103.
21. Martin WJ, et al. Stealth virus epidemic in Mohave Valley, I: Initial report of virus isolation. Pathobiology 1997;65(l):351-356.
22. Lederberg J. Letter to the editor. Science, Oct. 20, 1967, p. 313.
24. Immunologic findings in children with adnormal reactions after vaccination. Czechoslovakia Pediatrics 1993;48(1);9-12.
Dr. Buttram is a diplomat of the American Board of Environmental Medicine and a practicing physician in Quakertown, Pennsylvania. E-mail: hbuttram@woodmed.com.
Dr. Buttram has done a great work in providing a current summary of the state of the art of the vaccine dilemma. He is especially gifted at compiling this information.