New Vaccine Panel is Reviewing the Standard Vaccine Schedule for Children.    

The new Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, (ACIP) is reviewing the safety of the current childhood vaccine schedule. As I mentioned last week, I believe parents should be allowed to make an informed, educated & researched decision as to which vaccines they want or don’t want their children to get. I know my parents generation trusted anything the doctor told them, but historically we know that some of their recommendations were wrong. For instance, my aunt was given thalidomide in the 50’s to help with her morning sickness, but it lead to thousands of children being born with deformed limbs, including my cousin. Another aunt was given the drug Diethylstilbestrol, (DES) to prevent miscarriages, and that drug led to thousands of women having reproductive problems and not being able to have children. They became known as DES daughters. My point is, sometimes the medical industry is wrong, and we need to be able to make our own informed decisions. 

I remember when the HPV vaccine came out and they wanted all mothers to rush in and give the vaccine to their young girls. They told us that the vaccine was safe and had been tested for years. The recommendation was to give the vaccine to young girls before they became sexually active, between the ages of 9-12 years old. Were they able to study the effect of the vaccine on those girls 20 years later, when they were trying to get pregnant?  Could that have any connection to so many young women having problems getting pregnant? Who knows? I don’t want to be a conspiracy theorist, but I do wonder about those things.

According to Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist formerly at Harvard Medical School who is now serving as the ACIP chair, he said the new panel will study and evaluate the cumulative effects of the recommended vaccine schedule, including the “interaction effects between different vaccines, the total number of vaccines, cumulative amounts of vaccine ingredients and the relative timing of different vaccines.”   I personally think this is great and needs to be done. It never felt right to me to inject a beautifully healthy baby with so many vaccines at one time, without knowing the effect of the interactions of them all.   

Below is the current recommendation of vaccines for children from birth to 6 years old. That’s a lot of vaccines!

EWG Releases its Top Rated Sunscreen List!

Every year, I like to remind folks that our skin is our largest organ, and what you put on it, matters! Often we pay attention to what we put into our bodies, but when it comes to what we put on it, we are a bit more relaxed. That needs to change! What we put on our bodies can effect our health just as much as what we put into our bodies, so when it comes to Sunscreen, I trust the Environmental Working Groups (EWG) list of top rated brands. You also want to make sure that your sunscreen is safe for the reef, and won’t add to the dying of coral reefs. Check out their recommendations here