December 2008 Health in the News Archive

[ Monthly Index of New Briefs ]

I couldn't have said it better myself. Paying attention to these "10 worst offenders," is a general roadmap for better health for children. Fuhrman recommends 400 IU of vitamin D, however this is not nearly enough for most of us, children or adults. I would also add that some children simply do not tolerate cow's milk – after all, cow's milk was intended for baby cows, not baby people. But on the whole, these are excellent suggestions, and we would all do well to follow them.

This move by the FDA to reconsider its position is a good one. Exposure to BPA is widespread. A study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found it in the urine of nearly 93 percent of a sample population.

According to the Can Manufacturers Institute, more than 22 billion cans to be used for food and more than 100 billion cans for beer and soft drinks were produced last year. John Rost, a chemist and chair of the North American Metal Packaging Alliance, says "the vast majority" of them are lined with a resin coating containing BPA.

Given the threat to human health, it is better to be safe than sorry. The more we find out about plastics, the more we understand their downsides.

Influenza season is in full swing. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) designated last week as National Influenza Vaccination Week to highlight the importance of immunization and to foster greater use of the flu vaccine through this month and well into next year. I encourage you to view the various resources the CDC has prepared to help clinicians emphasize the importance of getting vaccinated—and of course we should be immunized ourselves.

Flu shots are vigorously promoted each year, but the latest science suggests they simply don't work very well because the flu virus mutates each year. The annual flu vaccine has not been shown to prevent flu-related deaths in people over the age of 65, according to the 2005 and 2007 Cochrane Collaborative's reports in the Lancet medical journal. Flu vaccine is preserved with thimerosal, which is 50% mercury. So with each shot comes a dose of a neurotoxin. Several states have prohibited the use of thimerosal in children's vaccines because of the debate over its role in autism and other developmental delays.

Many parents are fearful of vaccinating their children, and are questioning their pediatricians about the practice. The incidence of childhood vaccination does appear to be decreasing, and we are seeing more measles outbreaks in young children. Is this a matter for concern?

The American Medical News, a free publication for physicians put out by the AMA, has a headline on the front page of the December 15, 2008 edition: "Speaking language of vaccine safety" with the subtitle: "Easing parents' fears may mean moving beyond answers couched with scientific caveats".

In the body of the article, we read: "Dr. [Paul] Offit said the language of science can confuse lay people. Instead, physicians should rachet up the message and state their point emphatically – that the (MMR) vaccine does not cause autism." So physicians are urged to use techniques common in demagoguery – to cut back on scientific evidence, and have parents simply imaging what would happen if they did NOT vaccinate their child. The example given involves a child who grows up to work in a far-off place in the world where polio is still endemic. What a tragedy it would be if that child got polio because he had not been vaccinated. Indeed, more children are getting the measles in England, because "people are much more afraid of autism than they are of measles." And with good reason – measles is, for the most part, a fairly mild childhood infection which on rare occasion can go on to infect the brain, causing encephalitis. Autism is now seen in 1 of every 160 children, and appears to be pretty much life-changing for the entire family, in all those in whom it is diagnosed.

The estimated incidence of measles encephalitis, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1972, was 1 in 100,000 cases of measles infection. Their calculation of the incidence of subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SCPE, hardening of the brain, almost always fatal) was 1 in a million cases of measles. Somehow by 1997, the American Academy of Pediatrics reported that the incidence of measles encephalitis was 1 in 1000 cases. They reported that the incidence of mortality was increased in children with leukemia and HIV infection, or otherwise compromised immune systems. Better statistics? Someone else's database? It's hard to figure out how the incidence could have changed so drastically in 15 years. After all, the MMR vaccine was being given during that time. Did the introduction of the MMR vaccine cause the incidence of measles encephalitis to skyrocket?

Too many people have seen their children change after vaccination with large numbers of vaccines (5 or 6 at a time) for us to ignore the association. Some become ill with high fever, some lose their words, others develop a change in their behavior, some in their personalities, still others become diagnosed with speech delay, or PDD NOS, or autism, or ADHD within 1-2 weeks after vaccination Is it always caused by mercury in the thimerosal preservative which used to be used? Probably not, since we are no longer using thimerosal preservative in children's vaccines – except flu vaccine, which is recommended for children at 6 months. Is it the massive assault on their immune systems because of multiple vaccinations? Possibly. There are lots of anecdotes, but no controlled studies. Is it the assault on the immune systems of specific children who have poor detoxification capability? More likely. Many children indeed do just fine after vaccination – sometimes they get a fever, sometimes they are fussy for a couple of days, but most of them do not have lasting effects – that we have been able to measure. On the other hand, the incidence of AD/HD and behavioral problems has skyrocketed in the last 15 years, since we have been giving large numbers of vaccinations to infants. Why take chances?

Where is the harm in spreading out the vaccines – doing them one at a time, using preservative-free preparations, and monitoring neurologic status? Or even doing a genetic test of the methylation-sulfation cycle within the first couple of months of their lives, so that we might have some clue which children need to be treated differently? Yes, it would cost some more money. But think how much money we might be able to save in NOT having to care for developmentally delayed and dysfunctional children later on. I hope to see more rational dialog between pro- and anti- vaccine camps. I am of the moderate camp – my kids grew up in the era when they received one or two vaccinations at a time, and I never saw a child with autism until just the last decade. I love not seeing H flu meningitis – that was a horrific disease. But I surely do not like seeing autism. Somewhere in there must be a middle ground.

Prevention is NOT early diagnosis of a disease. It is diagnosis of the metabolic potential for disease, and then doing something about it. That is true prevention. Pre-venire comes from the Latin, meaning: to go before. BEFORE the disease manifests is when we want to make the diagnosis. It may not help today's bottom line, but surely will help tomorrow's.

The high-cereal high fiber diet emphasized "brown foods" such as whole-grain bread and breakfast cereal, brown rice and potatoes with the skin on. The low-glycemic diet included beans, peas, lentils, pasta, quickly boiled rice and certain breads, like pumpernickel and rye, as well as oatmeal and oat bran cereals.

It is interesting with the rise in celiac disease and other digestion disorders, that the nutritionists did not consider the impact of wheat, a component in both diets. The wheat available today, whether whole-grain or not, is an intensely hybridized wheat that is very different from what was eaten during Roman times for example. Ancestral grains are generally superior to the modern hybrids in mineral, vitamin, protein and fat content. Modern wheat has a higher gluten content so that commercial baked goods will rise higher. Remember that fluffy Wonder Bread? Gluten, the protein found in wheat, rye, barley, can be very inflammatory; some experts believe an estimated 40 percent of the population has wheat allergies and/or sensitivities. Food long revered as "the staff of life" has become a toxic substance to large numbers of people.

Screening for Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) is all well and good – at least we are beginning to recognize that TBI exists, and that it can affect lives. Unfortunately, the best that allopathic medicine has to offer is talk therapy or drugs, neither of which really addresses the root of the problem – the massive disruption of individual nerves and nerve bundles that occurs with shearing and twisting forces. Neurotherapy is a very well known and well researched way to treat TBI. It is effective in a remarkably short period of time, and could save the mildly brain injured untold hours of grief and disability. Neurotherapy can be done through the older style of EEG-feedback training, or through the newer HEG biofeedback. They are both effective. HEG biofeedback takes less time and is less messy than EEG biofeedback. I wonder why this modality of treatment is not more widely recognized in the allopathic medicine community. Could part of the reason be that it is relatively inexpensive and does not use pharmaceutical drugs? Or is it because this form of therapy is also used by psychologists and other health care practitioners who are not medical doctors? Whatever the reason, I think it's a great shame that we physicians are so unwilling to embrace new modalities of therapy which are effective both in terms of cost and therapeutic outcome. At the Arizona Center for Advanced Medicine we treat people with traumatic brain injury, using a whole therapeutic program which includes 20 sessions of HEG, restoring brain function and abilities better than any other program I have ever experienced.

The American Medical Association, WHO, and the American Dental Association all back fluoridation, but there is a growing understanding among the public that it is not safe — hence all those ballot measures.

A year ago, a tidal wave of concerns over excess fluoride prompted the American Dental Association (ADA) to warn parents not to mix baby formula with tap water during an infant's first twelve months.

In 2005, frustrated by EPA administrators' lack of response to mounting evidence of harm from fluoride, eleven unions within EPA representing 7,000 lab workers, scientists, and others publicly called for the immediate halt to fluoridation based on concerns about fluoride-caused bone cancer.

The Fluoride Deception by prize-winning journalist Christopher Bryson documents how industrial interests, concerned about liabilities from fluoride pollution, played a significant role in the early promotion of fluoridation. Bryson shows that the endorsement of fluoridation was about far more than a simple concern for preventing tooth decay. Check out http://wideeyecinema.com/?p=29

Fluoride proponents overlook a basic question: What causes cavities? Bacteria and acids in the mouth mix with food particles and our saliva to form plaque. Bacteria, not sugar, are directly to blame for cavities. But sugar feeds the bacteria, makes the plaque will grow faster and thicker. As the ADA points out, I in every 4 beverages consumed in American today is a sugary soft drink.

There was outrage when dogs and cats were sickened and died a few months ago, because of melamine contamination of their food. We did not discover melamine contamination of baby formula until thousands of infants became ill in China. Why is there melamine contamination in the first place? We all are familiar with melamine dishes – hard glossy plastic dishes. It is also used for laminates (kitchen counter tops, furniture) and flame retardants. Melamine also was found to help control the dispersion of nitrogen in the soil – and so it is applied along with fertilizer to food crops, without any governmental control over how much is applied. The melamine is incorporated into the food crops, because it shows up in animal feed made from those food crops. So there is no reason to be surprised that it would show up in products made from those food crops, or from the animals which ate the crops.

It would appear that the only relatively safe source of food would be organic, food produced without artificial fertilizers – assuming that the organic animals did not eat grass fertilized with artificial fertilizers. It is becoming more and more difficult to feed our families food which is safe. I wonder whether our government will realize there is an opportunity to set standards for the use of this chemical in food products. In the meantime, organic is safer than non-organic. Breast milk is safer than formula. Cow's milk is for baby cows.