Tag Archives: covid-19

Carvings March 1, 2025

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In the news

Measles redux

            Almost exactly one year ago (March 15th) I wrote about a measles outbreak in Florida. More than 90 percent of the victims had never received the measles vaccine. In the past few weeks we have seen an even larger outbreak involving nearly 150 children and adults – that number may have increased by the time this article has been posted – and one child has died. Again, 90 percent of the victims had not been vaccinated against measles, many of them belonging to a religious sect that eschews vaccines. What a terrible price to pay! The measles vaccine, part of the Measles-Mumps-Rubella triad, is effective in preventing the disease in 95 percent of recipients. Except for fever and sometimes a mild rash, the vaccine is almost entirely free of side effects, though there have been a few cases of severe complications.

            I’d like to repeat a comment that I have made before regarding those children who do have the aforementioned side effects. If a child experiences an illness from a severely weakened vaccine virus, he or she might well have been one of those unusually vulnerable children who died or suffered severe brain damage from the wild virus in the pre-vaccine era.

            Although measles has for decades been referred to as one of the “usual childhood diseases” it has other untoward effects. Besides causing mild inflammation of the brain in about one half of those who experience measles, thus impairing their school performance for months, nearly all victims will be found to have weakening of the immune system that lasts for two or three years. That means that they are more than ordinarily susceptible to other infections such as pneumonia.

            Measles is rampant in the developing world, where it is a major cause of blindness and death. It’s no coincidence that almost every outbreak in the United States has originated with someone who came from or recently traveled in another country.

Lifestyle

            It’s becoming evident that the Standard American Diet (SAD) is causing more damage to the nation’s health than just obesity, cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes. A few recent headlines make for interesting reading:

            Low vitamin D a contributor to mental disorders in children?

            Three vitamin deficiencies* linked to headaches.

            Vitamin B1 deficiency*: these are the symptoms.

            Dementia risk could increase with low levels of essential vitamin.

            Vitamin deficiencies* common among people with type 2 diabetes.

            16 signs you may have iron deficiency*

            This is only a small sample of the increasing number of reports in recent years that reveal the prevalence of vitamin “inadequacies” that lead to poor function without severe “deficiency” such as profound weakness and bleeding disorder of vitamin C deficiency (scurvy) or the debilitating (and permanent) brain and nerve damage of vitamin B12 deficiency known as pernicious anemia, or the tragic and irreversible mental deterioration that results from vitamin B1 deficiency. Pediatricians of a century ago dealt with rickets, the marked deficiency of vitamin D that produced not only weakened bones but brain damage and death. (* These are inadequacies, not deficiencies.)

            Nearly a quarter-century ago (!) the American Medical Association reversed its position and acknowledged that EVERYONE should take a multimineral/multivitamin every day. (Journal of the American Medical Association June 19, 2002, Vol. 287, No. 23, P. 3127) The national diet has only gotten worse since then.

            Eighty-two percent of Americans are obese or overweight; twelve percent have type 2 diabetes and twice that number have prediabetes; cancer and stroke are increasing dramatically in young adults.

            What will it take for all of us to take seriously Make America Healthy Again?

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The lesson: vitamin deficiencies are not common but vitamin inadequacies are. Even the American Medical Association, in a pair of landmark publications in 2002, (Journal of the American Medical Association June 19, 2002, Vol. 287, No. 23, P. 3127) urged that everyone should take a multivitamin/multimineral every day, a position completely opposite that of earlier recommendations and sadly still espoused by some physicians today.

Carvings February 1, 2025

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Why vaccines fail

            One of the major factors in the steep rise in life expectancy that occurred between 1900 and 2000 was the development of childhood vaccines. Today’s young physicians may never see a child with measles, polio, some forms of bacterial meningitis or chickenpox. Even the oldest physicians among us have likely never seen a child dying agonizingly from whooping cough or tetanus or diphtheria, those diseases having been vanquished before World War Two. If these diseases occur in the United States – and they do sometimes – it is usually because the patient came from a country where medical care is poor and immunization rates are much lower than they are here, or because parents have been caught up in the anti-vaxx hysteria that has been increasingly common in the twenty-first century.

            But sometimes a vaccine does fail to provide infection from the disease that almost always prevents the disease against which it is targeted. One reason is that some vaccines must be kept at specified refrigerator temperatures. When the measles vaccine was released in 1963 pediatricians noted occasionally that vaccinated children developed measles. Investigation showed that some pediatricians’ staff had placed the vaccine on a door shelf of the refrigerator instead of deep inside, which had been recommended. The slight increase in the temperature of vials kept on the door shelf was high enough to weaken the live vaccine, rendering it ineffective. The oral polio vaccine, a live form developed by Albert Sabin, has the advantage of not requiring needles and syringes that are prohibitively costly in developing countries, but it requires a “cold chain” that is also expensive in order to prevent degradation of the vaccine.

            Children who are born with a severe immune deficiency or those whose immune system is weakened by chemotherapy will not respond to the stimulus of a vaccine agent. Obesity may be a factor in the adult population, not only because obesity or its accompaniment, type 2 diabetes, degrades the immune system but because ordinary-length needles fail to reach the muscle tissue deep within a layer of fat. The result is that the patient cannot develop adequate antibodies or immune cells.

            Vaccines vary tremendously in their duration of protection. Diphtheria and tetanus vaccines provide nearly lifelong immunity but the mumps virus fails to protect after just a few years. The disturbing occurrence of numerous mumps outbreaks among young adults has prompted a reevaluation of that vaccine. Yet more evidence that mother nature keeps throwing curveballs!

Carvings October 15, 2024

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In the news

Don’t trust the COVID vaccine? Okay, but don’t let that keep you from getting the vaccines you need.

            A University of Pennsylvania study describes three major misconceptions that Americans hold about the COVID vaccine:

            COVID vaccines have contributed to thousands of deaths.

            Getting COVID is less risky than getting the COVID vaccine.

            COVID vaccines will change your DNA.

            Although these beliefs are incorrect, they carry strong emotional weight with lots of people, so I won’t bother to address them further. However, beliefs such as this and the vile theory that the MMR vaccine causes autism have dissuaded many parents from giving their children basic childhood vaccines, and kept adults from getting the vaccines they need to prevent death or serious illness.

            Hundreds of cases of measles and thousands of cases of pertussis (whooping cough) have occurred in the past few years because of poor compliance with childhood vaccination guidelines. I have a deep fear that it’s only a matter of time before we begin to see two diseases that I saw many times in my early, pre-vaccine pediatric career – Hemophilus influenzae meningitis and epiglottitis. The latter is a swiftly moving, often deadly infection.

            Some adults are reluctant to get two vaccines that are intended for them, the pneumococcal and shingles vaccines. The former prevents what was once a common cause of pneumonia, especially among the elderly, and I have seen the consequences of shingles – blindness and near-constant, severe pain.

            I addressed the influenza vaccine in earlier posts. I remind you that the flu season is underway and the virus is circulating in San Diego. Be warned.

Lifestyle

            In the course of grocery shopping at Albertson’s and Walmart last week I again had to run the gauntlet of cookies and cakes, augmented by Halloween sweets, cleverly positioned to greet shoppers as they enter the store. A reminder that much of the American diet is obesogenic and diabetogenic. With the holiday season little more than a month away it’s time to strengthen our mindset to avoid, or at least limit, the foods that provide us with energy and nothing else. I’d like to share a couple of steps that I have taken to bolster that resolve.

            At a banquet a couple of days ago the table was set with a healthy-looking salad, alongside which was a scrumptious-looking chocolate dessert – a genuine work of art. Knowing that I won’t always be able to resist the temptation in the coming weeks, I gave my resolve a kick-start by leaving it alone.

            Today’s lunch at the old folks’ home in which I reside included a seafood club sandwich. I asked them to leave out the bacon. I do have to admit that I missed it!

            Caring friends will soon stop by with plates and boxes of Christmas cookies, etc. It’s OK to have a taste and to toss the rest in the trash a week later. (Wow! Did Phil really say that?) Better there than on your waistline.

            Go ahead and have as much as you want at Thanksgiving. After all, it is a Feast Day!

            I hope that this short list will have given you some ideas as we enter our overly tempting holiday season. But it’s okay to enjoy some of these treats that only come along once a year. (Note the word “some” in that last sentence.)