Wyeth Lederle, is available in both single-dose (thimerosal-free) and multidose (thimerosal-containing) formulations; as of July 2000, the company is scheduled to produce only the single-dose, thimerosal-free Hib formulation.
VaccineWebsite.com collects a wide variety of somewhat disorganized information about Hib. They raise some concerns about possible associations with asthma and diabetes. They also indicate that the vaccine may actually cause Hib disease in some cases.

http://www.larkfarm.com/AP/hib.htm
Serious vaccine-associated reactions have been reported
The vaccine has been associated with an increased susceptibility to Hib meningitis in the first week following vaccination.

Most meningitis cases occurred in children younger than 5 years. ...
Meningitis is an inflammation of the membranes that cover the brain and spinal cord.

I would note that a HIB vaccine might cause a triggering meningitis event that might lead to Autism.

I would also never encourage the wrecking of an immune system with any kind of vaccine before the age of 5. If you vaccinate younger than 5, the effects of toxin loads from vaccines related to weight is significant.

Avoiding the flu by increasing the amount of water consumption, eliminating dairy, and loading up on vitamin C is a much more sane route to fighting infection.

My daughter had a serious reaction to vaccines and she is now diagnosed as Autistic. What the doctors know but will not tell you may injure your child, harm their immune system, or even kill your child. The most vulnerable to vaccines are children under 5 years of age but any vaccine intoduced may cause lifelong physical and or mental health problems.

If it gets far enough that you are in the doctor's office, ask for the possible side effects. Wyeth Lederle's thimerosal containing vaccine should be avoided at all cost.

If you actually take your child in, do so after several days of vitamin C and zinc. You are more or less going to be making them sick to possibly some day prevent them from being sick, so do so with extreme caution. If your child is vaccinated, avoid dairy, refined sugary foods, and refined sugary beverages for at least one week following vaccination. Avoid any fast food or processed for one week as well. Have your child drink plenty of clean filtered water or distilled water. Salt food with unrefined Sea Salt . And pray...

Rwardin:

I had a terrible time deciding about vaccines and dealing with doctors who really tightened the screws (eventually changed to a doctor who didn't make me feel like I was threatening the life of our twins -- after a huge showdown with two doctors at the large pediatric practice where we had been going). Ugh!

At that practice I let them talk me into Hib. I totally regret doing it. I can't remember what the rationale was and there were no immediate or later side effects (that we know about, right?).

Current doc is OK with no vax as these are "only children," so to speak, with no others coming home with germs. There have been some Whooping Cough outbreaks at local schools in the past few years and he has been urging us to vax for pertussis. Now there is mumps at UVA (we live in central Virginia) and so I am sure he would encourage mumps. He does offer single-dose vaccines, rather than the bundled ones.

Happily the babies have been pretty healthy so we do not go into his office very much!

I read Christiane Northrup's very reasoned and sensible position on vaccines. As both a mother and a doctor I find her credible. She suggests if you want to vaccinate, waiting until after 2 when brain is more than 80% developed, and only using half doses, and doing one at a time. (Though she recommends against it overall.) She lists some products to take around vax time if you are nursing, or to give your children -- someone else mentioned them -- zinc and Vitamin C. As well as some immune-boosters.

I heard a lecture by Dr. Erik Rydland, a practicing pediatrician in Florida. He has a website with several whole-foods derived supplements. He is moving toward a no-vax practice I think, and it is interesting to hear his perspective as he was pro-vax when he began practicing 25 or so years ago! He has used nosodes for effective treatment of pertussis (nosodes: homeopathic vaccinations, pretty much, from what I could tell).

My advice is to read Northrup (I got her recent book, "Mother-Daughter Wisdom," when I was pregnant -- a shame that perhaps some mothers of sons might pass it over because of the title!) and follow your gut. I was SO miserable when my daughters were getting that shot -- it felt very "wrong". Anyway, Northrup is very reassuring and does offer a course of treatment for people who want to vax eventually. You can Google Dr. Rydland. Sometimes it is easier for my non-vax friends to find a doctor believable -- talking about someone's experience with a child who suffers from vax-related illnesses may just hit too close to home.

Regarding your husband: I just kept telling mine, who was also more pro-vax, "Well, you go ahead and take them in for their shots!" Needless to say, this did not occur! ;) (Hopefully this is the worst form of manipulation that will ever occur in my marriage!)

Good luck!

-- Laura

Besides the load of info on the net, a great resource is the book by Dr. Stephanie Cave, "What Your Doctor May Not Tell You About Children's Vaccinations."

Insist that your husband read this book and tell him if he doesn't you win by default. Even if you do choose any vaccinations, 5 months is too early.

Here are some things you might like to consider.

Firstly, the obvious. Most doctors, particularly young doctors **have** to advocate vaccines. If they don't, and their numbers build up, they really get it in the neck from their peers, what was NIP, and what is CDC, FDA.

Therefore, while lip service is given to informed choice, in reality, every meeting with a doctor is now a vaccination opportunity they are told to push. So if you arrive at ER with a bee sting, don't be surprised to be offered a tetanus shot, and then find you got bulldozed into the new adult tetanus diphtheria and pertussis, becuase in practice, you can't get tetanus alone now, and haven't been able to for several years.

Now, about Hib, and prevnar.

The first thing to consider in terms of prevnar is what the real risks are.

You might like to read this medical article and see if you fall into the catagory of those really at risk:

I hope these URLs work:

http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/reprint/103/3/e28

Risk Factors for Invasive Pneumococcal Disease in Children: A Population-based Case-Control Study in North America


Then consider this article here:

http://www.newsrx.com/library/topics/Pneumococcal-Vaccine/26799.html

Pneumococcal parapneumonic empyema is more common since pneumococcal conjugate vaccine introduction

Which is confirmed by this BMJ letter here:

http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/eletters/330/7489/456

The same trend was note in this journal here:

Clinical Microbiology and Infection, Volume 12 Number 9, September 2006
Invasive pneumococcal disease among children in a health district of
Barcelona: early impact of pneumococcal conjugate vaccine
E. Calbo1, et al.

Furthermore, the same article talks about serotype replacement, in that the vaccinated children still carried pneumococcus, but types NOT in the vaccine.

There is considerable discussion about the fact that both Hib and prevnar force a bacterial type shift, which is what you'd expect. Nature abhors a vacuum, and if you make a hole, something else will fill it. This is proven in this article here:

http://www.cbc.ca/story/science/national/2006/06/13/vaccines-north.html?ref=rss

June 2006.

Medical officials have relied on the vaccine Prevnar for several years to protect infants against the bacteria, responsible for 80 per cent of pneumococcal disease. Now, they say, it's beginning to fail to protect infants against new strains on the rise.

"The vaccine is covering those serotypes that were most prevalent in Alaska and has reduced them dramatically," said Dr. Michael Bruce of the Centre for Disease Control, based at the Arctic Investigations Program in Anchorage.

"And now we're seeing other serotypes moving in to fill the niche and so that is worrisome."

....Larke also points to worrisome developments with the Haemophilus Influenza type B vaccine, which he says has been almost miraculous in the fight against meningitis. The disease can lead to brain damage and deafness in infants.

Medical officers are now seeing another serious strain, called Type A, and there's no vaccine for it.



Many of us told them about this for years right from the start. When Hib was used, it was then that the Pneumococcus started to radically increase, and when it started, new types shifted in, and now new Hib are coming forward.

I've raised this issue with Dr Marc Lipsitch, who has written stuff on bacterial serotype replacement, but so far he has had nothing to say on the matter.

But its a serious evolving issue, and the fact is that the ACTUAL amount of all bacterial meningitis hasn't reduced one iota. All the vaccines appear to do is to make a hole, into which something else steps, because the key factor isn't the bacteria. The key factor is individual host susceptibilities. That's why 4,999 out of 5,000 people who meet any meningitis bacteria get nothing other than natural immunity.

That's why you have a family tree.

The reason for the huge upswing in meningitis problems in my opinion is multifactorial. First, the use of Antibiotics , while they have saved many lives, went on to become Antibiotic abuse, given for every sniffle and sneeze, and disturbed drastically, the biotic flora in humans. Given that the "gut" is 70% of the immune system, if you mess it up, you increase susceptibilities to a lot of things, not just gram negative bacteria. And what doctors, apart from Melchinek (spelling) and other probiotic officionados, ever bothered to tell parents gut flora needs to be re-established after being trashed by Antibiotics ?!

Second the use of vaccines has further created problems and imbalances, which if I go into here, will result in a tome tome and tome...

Third, there is evidence that we have broad spectrum immunity to all bacterial meningitis's, but when you vaccinate against one, you reduce that radically. The work on this has never been done officially. It was started in the forties, raised worrying issues, and has never been followed up since. That can be found in

‘THE YOUNGEST SCIENCE; notes of a medicine-watcher” by Lewis Thomas, OUP, 1984, pp 75-78

Here is the relevant passage.

“So we packed again, and flew to Halifax, where I went to work on the treatment of meningococcal meningitis with a new sulphonamide called sulfadiazine, of which I had never heard, and Beryl was recruited as a laboratory assistant to keep the records and carry cultures from one place to another.

We were in Halifax for about a month, culturing the spinal fluid of several hundred patients with meningitis, collecting samples of serum from these patients and other people who did not develop meningitis but were in close contact, in order to study the possible role of antibodies in protection against the disease, and recording with care the clinical course of the illness under treatment with sulfadiazine, which was administered to all patients with an established diagnosis. Sulfadiazine was wonderfully effective. The only patients who filed to recover were those with a rapidly developing and overwhelming infection – some of them became comatose within a few hours and were brought to the hospital in deep shock, their skin surfaces covered everywhere by areas of hemorrhagic necrosis (looking very much like the Shwartzman phenomenon which I was to study several years later), and these patients were dead before we could start treatment. All the rest, the majority, recovered promptly when given sulfadiazine, and we saw none of the late complications – blindness, deafness, mental confusion – which had occurred in earlier epidemics of untreated meningococcal meningitis.

We came back to Boston with crates of cultures and sera, and my laboratory was committed to the problem of the meningococcus and the mechanism of its peculiar affinity for the surfaces of the brain and spinal cord in human beings. None of the conventional laboratory animals were particularly vulnerable to this organism: rabbits, guinea pigs, rats and mice could tolerate the intravenous injection of huge numbers of live meningococci without turning a hair, and the bacteria disappeared from their bloodstreams within ten minutes or so. It was evident that the animals possessed a highly effective mechanism for their protection, and I settled down to find out more about this. The first and simplest possibility, that they were able to kill off the injected meningococci by means of an already existing “natural” antibody, was easiest to test in rabbits, so rabbits became the laboratory’s routine animal. We quickly learned that the serum of a normal adult rabbit was capable of destroying almost any number of meningococci; when up to a million organisms were added to a single millilitre of freshly obtained rabbit serum, and the mixture then incubated for a few hours at 17 degrees Centigrade, the specimens became sterile. If the serum samples were heated at 56 degrees Centigrade for an hour before adding the bacteria, the bactericidal action was complete lost, indicating that the killing power depended on the presence of complement (a sequence of proteins, still incompletely understood, which makes possible the action of antibodies against antigens on the surface of bacteria).

We though it useful, given so powerful an example of natural immunity already in existence in animals, to see whether we could obtain even stronger antibacterial sera by immunizing the rabbits. We injected animals with suspensions of heat-killed meningococci, and collected sera at weekly intervals. These samples were set up as in the initial experiments adding various numbers of live bacteria to the serum specimens and determining how many were killed and how quickly. Within the next few days we encountered our paradox: the sera from the immunized rabbits, which had been capable of killing a million meningococci in a few hours, had now lost this property. There were potent and specific antibodies in these sera, as we could show in other kinds of tests – agglutination, precipitation, and complement fixation tests. But with the appearance of a specific antibody, the bactericidal activity vanished.

Moreover, something of the same sort could be show in the whole rabbit in vivo. When we injected live bacteria into the bloodstream of our immunized animals, and then measured the survival of bacteria by serial blood cultures, we were surprised to learn that the blood cultures were still positive twenty-four hours later in the more intensively immunised rabbits, in contrast to the unimmunised animals, in which all of the meningococci had disappeared within ten to fifteen minutes.

By this time, it was late April of 1941 and I was in a hurry. The problem had turned into something fascinating, involving both paradox and surprise. I knew I was expected back in New York the next January to become a neurologist, so I worked as fast as I could. What I had run into was an antique immunologic phenomenon called the “prozone”, in which an excess of antibody turns off the immune reaction unless the serum is sufficiently diluted. However, the difference in my laboratory – what was new – was that it worked in vivo: an immunized animal could lose, as the result of being immunized, its own natural defense. This might I thought, have useful implications for susceptibility in certain human infections beyond meningitis – typhoid fever and brucellosis, for example – and I wanted to get on with it.

However, as it turned out, I never got to finish the problem or even answer the principal questions. Nor did I ever get back to the Neurological Institute. The Rockefeller Institute was put on notice in late 1941, then mobilized as a naval medical research unit; I was assigned to it as lieutenant, and received orders to turn up in New York, in uniform, by the end of March 1942. John Dingle and I reluctantly agreed to bring the still inconclusive problem of the in vivo prozone to a premature end and write the work up; to this day, I’ve never been able to return, full-time, to the problem. It still hangs there in my kind, and I don’t believe any other laboratory has ever settled it.”

Note about the author: Lewis Thomas was chancellor of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York city, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He served as Professor of Pediatric Research at the University of Minnesota, as Chairman of the Departments of Pathology and Medicine, and also Dean at the New York University-Bellevue Medical Center, and as Chairman of Pathology and Dean at Yale Medical School.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I have forwarded this to all the relevant meningo research people and so far, the answer is silence.

Hope this is of some use.