Browsing Tag Singapore

Very few doctors inform parents about vaccine risks. But vaccine manufacturers place warnings in vaccine containers indicating who should not receive vaccinations. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) also make recommendations indicating who should not receive vaccinations. (The AAP publishes a Report of the Committee on Infectious Diseases every four years; HHS has guidelines formulated by the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which appear in the Morbidity and Mortality Report published by the CDC). This information is included below:

POLIO: Children younger than 6 weeks; people who are ill, or who have cancer of the lymph system.

MEASLES: Children younger than 15 months; pregnant women; people who are ill, or who are allergic to eggs, chicken, feathers, or who have cancer, blood disease, or deficiencies of the immune system.

RUBELLA: Pregnant women; people who are allergic to eggs, chicken, duck, or feathers, or who have cancer, blood disease, or deficiencies of the immune system.

DPT: Any child past the 7th birthday, or who has had a severe reaction to a previous dose, or who has a personal history of convulsions or neurological disease, or who is acutely sick with a fever or respiratory infection, or who is taking medication that may suppress the immune system.

The three vaccine policymakers in America, noted above, do not “officially” consider the following conditions contraindications to the DPT vaccine. However, scientific literature published by pertussis vaccine researchers throughout the world for the past 40 years indicates that such conditions may put a child at high risk:

1. The child is ill with anything, including a runny nose, cough, ear infection, diarrhea, or has recovered from an illness within one month prior to a scheduled DPT shot.

2. The child has a family member who had a severe reaction to a DPT shot.

3. Someone in the child’s immediate family has a history of convulsions or neurological disease.

4. The child was born prematurely or with low birth weight.

5. The child has a personal or family history of severe allergies (i.e., cow’s milk, asthma, eczema).

Vaccines may also be contraindicated for certain people with special conditions not listed above. If you suspect that you or your child may be at high risk, Get The Facts!

In 1986, Congress in USA officially acknowledged the reality of vaccine-caused injuries and death by creating and passing The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (Public Law 99-660). The safety reform portion of this law requires doctors to provide parents with information about the benefits and risks of childhood vaccines prior to vaccination, and to report vaccine reactions to federal health officials.
Doctors are required by law to report suspected cases of vaccine damage. To simplify and centralize this legal requisite, federal health officials established the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) — operated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).(40)

Ideally, doctors would abide by this federal law and report adverse events following the administration of a vaccine. However, the FDA recently acknowledged that 90 percent of doctors do not report vaccine reactions. They are choosing to subvert this law by claiming the adverse event was, in their opinion, not related to the shot. In fact, every year about 12,000 reports of adverse reactions to vaccines are made to the FDA (data accessible only through the Freedom of Information Act). These figures include hospitalizations, irreversible brain damage, and hundreds of deaths. Considering that these numbers represent just 10 percent, the true figures during this period could be as high as 120,000 adverse events annually.

Maybe it doesn’t matter that doctors won’t report vaccine reactions, because the federal government won’t investigate them. Government officials claim VAERS was designed to “document” suspected cases of vaccine damage. No attempt is being made to confirm or deny the reports. Parents are not being interviewed, and the vaccines that preceded the severe reactions are not being recalled. Instead, new waves of unsuspecting parents and innocent children are being subjected to the damaging shots.

In order to pay for vaccine injuries and deaths, a surtax is levied on mandated vaccines. When parents elect to have their children vaccinated, a portion of the money they spend on each vaccine goes into a congressional fund to compensate them if their child is hurt or killed by the shot. This insurance fee ranges from several dollars per dose (for the DPT and MMR vaccines) to several cents per dose for some of the others.

The compensation portion of the law awards up to $250,000 if the individual dies, or millions of dollars to cover lifelong medical bills, pain, and suffering in the case of a living (but brain damaged) child. By August 31, 1997, more than $802 million had already been paid out for hundreds of injuries and deaths caused by mandated vaccines. Thousands of cases are still pending.

If vaccines are so safe, why do you have to pay a surtax to pay for legal costs?

Be well

Dr Sundardas

There is an ancient Chinese proverb or a curse depending on your perspective thatgoes something like, “May you live in interesting times”. And yes, we truly live in interesting times. The advances in Science, Technology and Medicine have been truly breathtaking and awe inspiring.

As we gambol merrily along our lives, we have to stop and think about the legacy that we are leaving our children in more ways than one. Are we giving our children a better standard of living? Are we leaving behind a better world? Are we leaving behind a happier world? As we look at these, the answers become a little more complex and less black and white. Yes, as we increase our income levels, they get to live in better quality buildings. Life gets more comfortable. There is access to increased medical care and better facilities. In most Asian countries as they rapidly modernize everything begins to look neater and cleaner. They never go hungry. They have access to appropriate educational facilities.

However lets look a little at the nitty gritty of the cleaner buildings and the other changes in the environment. Most of these changes are facilitated by the advent of modern technological changes. For one thing, every year there are 2000 new chemicals being introduced into the environment that were not there before. One estimate, is that from the time of our grandparents to date we have 100, 000 new chemicals that were not there before. If you ever go into a construction site, you would notice the use of glues, solvents and new chemicals that make the process of designing new buildings easy and the impact on biological systems traumatic. One of the most commonly used ingredients is formaldehyde. This was once primarily used to preserve dead animals It is a very toxic substance and is now used in 200 household items. Imagine what it does to the nerve and brain tissue of developing foetuses in the mother’s womb not to mention young children.

We are at the beginning of one of the most terrifying epidemics that is beginning to sweep the emerging first world economics ie. Asia, India and China. Its not SARs or even the swine flue. It’s the epidemic of Syndrome X. Syndrome X is the precursor to diabetes, heart disease and cancer. What is particularly pernicious about this is that the programming for this condition is in utero. The study of how genes are turned on or off by the environment (nutrition, diet, toxins and emotions) is called epigenetics. The implications of the epigenetic revolution are even more profound in light of recent evidence that epigenetic changes made in the parent generation can turn up not just one but several generations down the line, long after the original trigger for change has been removed.

In 2004 Michael Skinner, a geneticist at Washington State University, accidentally discovered an epigenetic effect in rats that lasts at least four generations. Skinner was studying how a commonly used agricultural fungicide, when introduced to pregnant mother rats, affected the development of the testes of fetal rats. He was not surprised to discover that male rats exposed to high doses of the chemical while in utero had lower sperm counts later in life. The surprise came when he tested the male rats in subsequent generations—the grandsons of the exposed mothers. Although the pesticide had not changed one letter of their DNA, these second-generation offspring also had low sperm counts. The same was true of the next generation (the great-grandsons) and the next.
Such results hint at a seemingly anti-Darwinian aspect of heredity. Through epigenetic alterations, our genomes retain something like a memory of the environmental signals received during the lifetimes of our parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and perhaps even more distant ancestors. So far, the definitive studies have involved only rodents. But researchers are turning up evidence suggesting that epigenetic inheritance may be at work in humans as well.
In November 2005, Marcus Pembrey, a clinical geneticist at the Institute of Child Health in London, attended a conference at Duke University to present intriguing data drawn from two centuries of records on crop yields and food prices in an isolated town in northern Sweden. Pembrey and Swedish researcher Lars Olov Bygren noted that fluctuations in the towns’ food supply may have health effects spanning at least two generations. Grandfathers who lived their preteen years during times of plenty were more likely to have grandsons with diabetes—an ailment that doubled the grandsons’ risk of early death. Equally notable was that the effects were sex specific. A grandfather’s access to a plentiful food supply affected the mortality rates of his grandsons only, not those of his granddaughters, and a paternal grandmother’s experience of feast affected the mortality rates of her granddaughters, not her grandsons.

The studies by Pembrey and other epigenetics researchers suggest that our diet, behavior, and environmental surroundings today could have a far greater impact than imagined on the health of our distant descendants. “Our study has shown a new area of research that could potentially make a major contribution to public health and have a big impact on the way we view our responsibilities toward future generations,” Pembrey says.

The logic applies backward as well as forward: Some of the disease patterns prevalent today may have deep epigenetic roots. Pembrey and several other researchers, for instance, have wondered whether the current epidemic of obesity, commonly blamed on the excesses of the current generation, may partially reflect lifestyles adopted by our forebears two or more generations back.

Michael Meaney, who studies the impact of nurturing, likewise wonders what the implications of epigenetics are for social policy. He notes that early child-parent bonding is made more difficult by the effects of poverty, dislocation, and social strife. Those factors can certainly affect the cognitive development of the children directly involved. Might they also affect the development of future generations through epigenetic signaling?

Be well
Dr Sundardas