There are several list members that express regrets about having had
children vaccinated. This is an interesting review:

Personal Health: For the Vaccine-Wary, a Lesson in History
By JANE E. BRODY
Keep a Record

A study conducted in the early 1990's by researchers at the University
of Chicago Children's Hospital revealed that parents could not be
relied
upon to give health professionals an accurate history of their
children's
immunizations.

The main problem occurs because parents fail to keep a vaccination
card
recording vaccines and the dates they are given, relying instead on
doctors to keep such a record. But when families move or switch
doctors,
the records become incomplete or misplaced.

At every well-child visit, the immunization card should be brought to
the
doctor's office or clinic and the vaccines recorded. Likewise, this
card
should be taken along if the child is brought to a hospital or
emergency
room for any reason.

-------------------------------------------------------

Most parents now raising questions about the safety and wisdom of
childhood immunizations have never seen a case of whooping cough,
polio,
measles or mumps. Parents now in their 20's and 30's grew up in an era
when they and all their schoolmates were protected against such
serious
infections by a series of vaccinations administered early in life.

Few such parents realize that small children can die or become
brain-damaged from a measles infection. They do not remember when
children were forbidden to swim in public pools all summer so they
would not contract polio. Nor have they seen children placed in iron
lungs because polio had crippled their respiratory muscles.

As a 59-year-old, I have a clear recollection of these unfortunate
events.
I also clearly recall my own experience with horrific cases of
chickenpox
(scarred for more than a decade), measles and mumps on both sides of
my
face simultaneously. And I can still hear the whooping coughs of a
childhood friend who developed pertussis and had to be hospitalized in
isolation.

Ill-informed hysteria about the safety of current vaccines could once
more bring these awful childhood diseases to the fore. To be sure,
most
parents who now resist childhood immunizations are well intentioned.
They
are only trying to protect their children from purported serious side
effects that have been bandied about in print, on the air, on the
floor
of Congress and now on the Internet. The Internet also offers guidance
on how parents can skirt the immunization requirements for entering
school.

How accurate are the accusations against vaccines, and what price
might we
pay for heeding them at the expense of the immunizations now
universally
recommended by pediatric and public health officials?

A pro-vaccine Web site, www.Pkids.org, offers some cautionary
statistics
regarding failure to immunize.

Before Vaccines

When I was a child, 13,000 to 20,000 cases of paralytic polio were
reported
in this country every year. Now there are none. Before children were
routinely immunized against measles, nearly every American child got
it
three million to four million cases, resulting in some cases of
measles
encephalitis and an average of 450 deaths a year.

The vaccine reduced measles cases by more than 95 percent. But as has
been
made clear from outbreaks of measles that have occurred where rates of
childhood immunization were low, the scourge of measles can return
quickly
and easily.

Whooping cough (pertussis), too, was nearly a universal occurrence of
childhood that killed 5 of every 1,000 children born in this country
before
pertussis immunizations. From 150,000 to 260,000 cases were reported
each
year, with up to 9,000 pertussis-related deaths. In the 1970's, the
British
showed what could happen when pertussis vaccination rates dropped.
After
questions were raised about the safety of the vaccine then in use,
immunization rates dropped to 60 percent in Britain and in the next
few
years, a series of pertussis epidemics occurred, including one
resulting in
more than 100,000 cases and 36 deaths. And in Japan, by 1979 pertussis
vaccination coverage dropped to 20 percent from 80 percent, leading to
more
than 13,000 cases and 41 deaths.

Before we had a vaccine for Haemophilis influenza type b (Hib), 20,000
infants and children each year developed invasive Hib infections,
two-thirds of which resulted in meningitis, a disease that killed 600
children each year and left many others with seizures, complete
hearing
loss or mental retardation. The vaccine, introduced in 1987, has
resulted
in a decline in Hib of more than 97 percent, to only 33 cases last
year.

Parents who refuse to have their children vaccinated are basically
counting on the fact that most children are immunized, conferring a
kind
of herd immunity. But as a serious outbreak of measles in Alaska
shows,
all it takes is one child with an active infection to cause widespread
problems among those not properly immunized.

Last spring, in a Washington Post editorial, Dr. Julian Orenstein, a
fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics who practices emergency
medicine in Fairfax, Va., warned colleagues to "bone up" about
infectious
diseases that they thought had disappeared: measles, mumps, whooping
cough.
"They may return," he said, because "some parents have stopped
trusting
the vaccinations that kept those illnesses at bay."

Safety Concerns Answered

The concerns of parents, and some medical professionals, have not gone
unheeded. Although follow-up studies did not support British fears
that
brain damage or sudden infant death could occur in rare cases after
pertussis inoculations, a new vaccine was developed that lacked the
potential for such an effect. While the old vaccine was based on whole
cells, the new one is acellular, made from only part of the infectious
organism. The new vaccine is associated with fewer minor side effects,
yet it appears to be as effective as the whole-cell vaccine in
preventing
whooping cough.

The switch from the original injected Salk polio vaccine to the oral
Sabin vaccine resulted in rare but serious cases of vaccine- related
paralytic polio. From 1980 to 1994, 124 American cases of
vaccine-associated
paralytic polio were reported. The Salk vaccine was made from
inactivated
viruses that could not cause disease. The Sabin vaccine, though easier
to
use and highly effective, was made from live attenuated viruses, some
of
which apparently retained their infectious potential. The current
recommendation for healthy children is administration of four doses of
the
inactivated Salk vaccine at 2 months, 4 months, 6 to 18 months and 4
to 6
years. The resulting immunity is as good as with the Sabin vaccine,
but the
risk of vaccine-induced polio is nonexistent.

With regard to measles vaccine, which is given along with vaccines for
mumps and rubella, no change has been made in either the vaccine
itself or
its recommended administration schedule. Yet some parents suspect that
the
vaccine or the combination of the three vaccines (M.M.R.), or some
other
vaccine combination, is responsible for a rise in autism cases among
infants and toddlers.

Studies have found no causal connection between the vaccines and
autism.
Rather, the autism cases seem to be coincidental with immunizations
and
their rise could simply be a result of better recognition and
diagnosis.
Also, though perhaps not noticed by parents or their pediatricians,
symptoms of autism are usually present at birth whereas the three-part
M.M.R. vaccine is administered at 12 to 15 months of age.
Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company