January 29, 2004
Concerned parents need to understand risks without vaccines
Parents have a lot of legitimate worries confronting them every day. Small worries include whether the offspring is wearing the right coat or hat for the weather (answer: probably not). Big worries, like obesity, safety and financial security, get plenty of parental time, too. Vaccinations probably enter the worry list at different levels of concern, depending on the parent in question. Many parents focus on potential adverse effects of the serums used in vaccinations, rather than on the potentially deadly effects of the diseases vaccines can prevent.
Dr. Alfred Berg, chair of the Department of Family Medicine in the UW School of Medicine, is very familiar with the debate over vaccinations. He is on a panel of experts appointed by the Institute of Medicine, a branch of the National Academy of Sciences, to evaluate concerns that vaccines cause undesirable side effects.
“The process for being appointed to this panel was pretty interesting, because you had to go back through your career and prove that you never took research funding from companies that make vaccines, and never wrote articles either for or against vaccines,” Berg says. “You had to be scientifically unbiased and without any hint of a financial conflict of interest. The Centers for Disease Control and other groups feed us questions about vaccines a few times a year. We collect the evidence and give the best answers we can about the science.”
Many parents have sought health information on Internet sites and been alarmed to find claims from anonymous “experts” that vaccines or their components cause immune disorders, diabetes, asthma and a number of other disorders. Berg says that while the jury is still out on a few questions, so far the evidence is in favor of making sure that your child has the vaccines recommended by your physician.
“The short answer is that for many of these hypothesized adverse effects, we find evidence showing that the vaccines are safe, or we may find that the science supporting these hypotheses is of such poor quality that we can’t say if there is a link or not,” Berg says. “There may be no evidence or there may be just individual cases where a child had a vaccine and then some months later developed a problem. People may believe that the two events are linked, but there’s no way to know.”
There may be short-lived side effects to vaccination, such as a low-grade fever or sore arm, but the benefits of being protected from illness generally outweigh these minor discomforts.
Some parents would prefer that their children not receive vaccines, since the majority of the children around them will be immunized, conferring what is called “herd immunity.” Their assumption is that there will be no outbreaks of diseases like mumps, measles and whooping cough and that if there are, their child will be cured by immediate medical care.
“Many parents have never seen cases of these diseases and they’ve never heard of children developing major complications, so they say why worry about what are ‘just childhood illnesses?’” Berg says. “I have actually seen a child die of whooping cough, and measles, polio, chicken pox and tetanus can be life-threatening. These are not harmless childhood illnesses; they can cause death and disability.”
