Mixed Views
on Measles Dangers
Well,
you asked for it and hopefully now, you’ve got it. A bi-weekly email newsletter
with what is happening in the world of the AVN in general and vaccination in
particular. As long as I have the time and energy, I will endeavour to get this
out to you every second Thursday (Thursday is a good time because I am
generally alone in the office on Thursdays so I have some good quality catch-up
time J)
Let
me say right here that if you don’t want to receive these updates, please
unsubscribe yourself as it is quite a simple thing for you to do. There is a
link at the bottom of this email – just click on it and you will be
unsubscribed, OK?
Unfortunately,
the $26 from every member donation drive has been floundering. After a flurry
of donations and pledges in the first days of our appeal, the not-so-grand
total to date is just over $1,700. Considering the fact that we have over 2,000
AVN members and another 800 or so readers of this email who have never joined
but are reading this information, I hope that this tally can be lifted
substantially in the next week or so. If you haven’t donated yet, please do so
and if you are not a member, have a think about joining. Also, remember to
forward our information on to friends, family and acquaintances who you think
might be interested in joining.
I don’t have
the venue set yet, but the dates are going to be the 14th and 15th
of August at this point in time. Not set in stone, but myself, Isaac Golden (Homoeopath,
expert in Homoeoprophylaxis or the prevention of infectious diseases using
homoeopathic nosodes and author of Vaccination – Risks and Alternatives) and Dr David Ritchie, paediatric registrar from New
Zealand and anthroposophical physician will be
speaking at either one or two seminars in Sydney.
We are holding
these seminars in conjunction with the department of homoeopathy at
As you can
imagine, there is a lot of work involved and we can really use your help. If
you live in
I
was contacted almost 2 weeks ago by one of our members, a chiropractor in
Tasmania, who was absolutely incensed by a series of articles in the Sunday
Examiner (Tasmania) which ran on both the front page and inside the body of the
paper about an ‘epidemic’ of measles which had occurred in a local school,
forcing over 100 children to stay home (one wonders why this particular school
had such a large number of unvaccinated children?).
Of
course, according to the newspaper, the ‘epidemic’ was caused by those nasty,
dirty unvaccinated kids. And because of the irresponsible attitudes of these
parents who refused to get their kids the shots that would keep them healthy
and save them from a deadly case of measles (tongue planted very firmly in
cheek here), a pregnant woman and her unborn child had been placed at risk.
Below
are some quotes from both the cover feature as well as the article inside.
Called Vaccination – Personal freedoms v community benefit, it was a
feature filled with inaccuracies and plain untruths provided by the medical
community at large.
An
outbreak of measles in a Tasmanian school this week has kept nearly 100
students home from class. Meanwhile, a pregnant woman has been left fearing for
her unborn child after indirectly being exposed via a child showing symptoms of
measles but who was still allowed to attend school.
…
The
medical profession believes the State is on the right path, the ethical argument
favours the community, civil libertarians prefer the “medical good” above “conscientious
objectors” and legally the argument swings both ways.
The
article inside is entitled Medical Importance Wins, and
contains the following quotes:
Concerns
over the ethics of childhood immunisation were raised this week with claims
that an unimmunised Launceston student placed a pregnant woman at risk of contractin measles.
“Certainly
a percentage of people experience severe side-effects from the vaccine but from
a community perspective, the preference is for everyone to be immunised,” Prof.
Malpas said.
…Parents
who do not immunise their children cannot receive government subsidies for child-care
and unimmunised school children are automatically sent home if there is an
outbreak. (ed note – NOT TRUE!
Whether you vaccinate or not, you can still get your subsidies by simply
registering as a Conscientious or Medical Objector to vaccination).
…For
parents with young children, Dr Jones (Tasmanian Division of General Practice
Immunisation spokeswoman) said complacency was often the biggest issue. “A lot
of time, people just haven’t got around to it,” she said.
Most
shocking to me however, were the quotes from Terry O’Gorman of the
inappropriately named Queensland Council for Civil Liberties, stating, “while
he respected a parent’s right to say no to immunisation, its medical importance
won out. ‘In the clash between the health argument for
the medical good versus the rise in parents being conscientious objectors, we
would go on the community health basis that it is a de facto compulsory vaccine,’
Mr O’Gorman said.
Mr
O’Gorman has a long history of stating that vaccination should be compulsory
and of opposing personal choice on this issue. My opinion is that Mr O’Gorman
should rename the organisation for which he works – The Queensland Council to
Take Away Civil Liberties because he is certainly not supporting those rights
which are at the core of personal liberty – the right to make choices based on
information and conscience.
On
their web page (http://www.qccl.org.au) it
says that:
The Queensland Council for Civil
Liberties is a voluntary organisation concerned with the protection of
individual rights and civil liberties. Our aims are to:
It is my
opinion however, that when it comes to the issue of health freedom, the QCCL
supports the rights of the doctors over the rights of the patients. Perhaps
they need a bit of an education themselves? Would you take 5 minutes to write
to Mr O’Gorman by using the contact link on the QCCL website (link above)? Just
let him know why you chose not to vaccinate and ask
his organisation to protect your rights too.
In any case, I
was able to speak with the journalist who had prepared this story. All of the
information she had used was provided by either the Department of Health or by
Dr Jones, quoted above. And she contacted the QCCL to get the other side and
had herself been shocked by the anti-choice attitude of Terry O’Gorman.
She was happy
to hear the story from the perspective of the AVN and to the newspaper’s credit, they ran an article the following Sunday which would
have helped to go a small way towards balancing out the previous feature.
Mixed Views on
Measles Dangers
Pregnant women exposed to
measles should not be concerned for their baby’s health according to the
Australian Vaccination Network.
Network president, Meryl
Dorey, contacted the Sunday Examiner this week following a story about a
pregnant woman who feared for her health after coming into contact with measles
at a Launceston school. Ms Dorey said she wished to clarify the misconception
that measles could harm a foetus.
She said rubella, more
commonly known as German Measles, could cause
congenital abnormalities, but measles could not. “People hear measles and think
German Measles, but it’s a different disease,” Ms Dorey
said. (ed note – it was the
woman’s own doctor who had warned her that her baby’s life could be at risk
because she had been exposed to the measles. Goodness only knows if he or she
advised an abortion or what the stress of worrying about this could have done
to this poor woman!)
But GP North media
spokeswoman Leanne Jones said measles was reported by the West Australian
health department as a risk factor for spontaneous abortion and premature
labour. (I have contacted the GP North offices and requested copies of these
studies. To date, nothing has been given to back-up this claim).
Even so, Ms Dorey said she
was concerned by the lack of independent vaccine information available to
parents. General practitioners receive financial benefits for vaccines they
administer which she said could act as a significant incentive for supporting
vaccination.
Dr Jones confirmed that
doctors received about $6 for every vaccination to compensate them for
reporting it and to cover costs. But she said the subsidy was only received for
vaccinations administered to children under seven who fall under the childhood immunisation
scheme.
Dr Dorey also claimed
doctors were threatened with being deregistered by the Australian Medical
Association if they spoke out against vaccination. “I don’t believe it’s
ethical for a doctor to have a vested interest in vaccination, so people need
to get independent information,” Ms Dorey said.
She said while the AVN was
not against vaccination, the public needed to be aware of the risks involved
and the success rate of each vaccine. “A study has found 50 per cent or more
people who contract measles are fully and appropriately vaccinated against it,”
Ms Dorey said. “The only way to become immune to the disease is to contract it.
That’s why we see unvaccinated and vaccinated children getting the disease.”
The AVN keeps a record of
negative reactions to vaccines and since 2002, has recorded 1,000 reactions and
21 child deaths after vaccination.
I checked with
the Department of Public Health in
Q- How many
cases of measles have been reported so far? Were any of these cases confirmed
by blood test or are they doctor-diagnosed?
A - 6
confirmed cases in accordance with case definitions.
Now, here is a
politically correct answer if I ever heard one. Obviously, if there had been a
blood test to confirm that this was measles, he would have simply said yes. But
since he states that this is confirmed “in accordance with case definitions”,
to my mind at least, that means a clinical diagnosis which has been shown time
and time again to be wrong many more times than it’s been right. Have a look at
the following information:
Taken from
PULSE, January 18, 1997
Measles is
wrongly diagnosed in 97 per cent of cases, according to new data from the
Public Health Laboratory Service. An evaluation of 12,000 notifications and
salivary samples from suspected cases showed the vast majority of people with a
measles-like rash have some other condition instead, according to Dr Mark Reecher, consultant in public health medicine at the Public
Health Laboratory Service, Colindale.
These findings
were backed up by a Tasmanian study published in 1999 showing that 95% of all
doctor diagnosed measles turned out on laboratory testing to be something else.
So…are we looking at an outbreak of measles at all or is this just another viral
illness which causes a rash? I am not convinced either way and am still looking
for the science in this panic.
Q
- What are the ages of those affected?
A - 6,18,16,51,13,9
Q
- What is the vaccination status of those affected?
A - All unimmunised
Q
- Have there been any hospitalisations or deaths from this outbreak?
A - No
Q
- Where is the
outbreak located - is it limited to Launceston or is this outbreak
Tasmania-wide?
A - North and Northwest regions.
Q
- I read that
50 children were excluded from the school in Launceston where this outbreak has
occurred - isn't that an unusually high number of unvaccinated children for one
school?
A - Varies and check with the school.
I
don’t know about you, but to my mind, these answers leave more unsaid then they
actually clear up. The one point I did want to bring out here however is that
there were no hospitalisations or deaths and there was no laboratory confirmation
that this was even measles.
Calls
to the AVN
I
really do need to start keeping a phone diary so I can share more of the calls
I receive with you. But here are a couple from the past fortnight that I can
recall as I sit here.
1- a young nursing student in QLD had been told that if she did
not receive the MMR vaccine, she would be kicked out of her course. She hadn’t
vaccinated her children and had never previously been vaccinated herself, but
she desperately wanted to be a nurse so she agreed reluctantly. Within a couple
of weeks of the vaccine, her lymph nodes were completely inflamed and she was
very ill. This continued for a further 6 weeks with her doctor diagnosing her
as being stressed and it wasn’t until she forced him to do a biopsy on her
lymph node that it was discovered that she had cancer. She told her doctor that
she felt this was related to the vaccine though of course, he pooh-poohed that
suggestion. She had that lymph node removed surgically (I have never understood
this procedure – why remove lymph nodes when they are one of the main lines of defence
against cancer?) and has since had several other lymph nodes become swollen and
infected.
We were able to
put her in touch with a nutritional medicine physician in
2- A mother
contacted us from WA who is a member of the AVN. She has been put under a huge
amount of pressure to vaccinate and lives in a very rural area where there are
absolutely no natural therapists for her to consult with and where she feels
very alone and unsupported. She vaccinated her daughter up until the age of 6
months before she found our information but decided to stop after that time.
The 12 month shots were now due and her doctor told her that the conscientious
objectors are being unconscientious about their decision and filled her with
fear of measles, mumps, rubella and chicken pox.
We discussed
these diseases and the fact that prior to vaccination, they were considered
benign diseases of childhood and there was no fear involved at all. It is only
since the vaccines became widespread that fear began to be used to try and
force parents to decide to vaccinate their children against illnesses which
previous caused very little harm in healthy, well-nourished children and in
fact, had some beneficial aspects to them as well.
This mother
will be putting a notice in the next edition of the Inside Edition’s Bulletin
Board to try and contact any other on-side parent who live
in her area of WA. She also felt more confident about her decision not to
vaccinate and has decided not to give in to pressure but to learn more about
both the diseases and the vaccines.
I hope you have
enjoyed this first attempt at keeping in closer contact with you all. If there
are any questions you have or any issues you would like to see covered either
here or in the magazine or the inside edition, please write to me at editor@informedvoice.com.au – I’d
love to hear from you!
Until next time – stay well and stay healthy!
Meryl Dorey