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