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Judy Converse MPH, RD, LD
Nutrition Care for Children
1150 Maxwell Avenue
Boulder, CO 80304
Harvey Fineberg, MD, PhD
President
Institute of Medicine
500 Fifth Street NW
Washington DC 20001
March 17, 2007
Dear Dr. Fineberg,
In your broad service and
duty for public health, I make the following appeal in earnest hope that it
will be considered. I apologize for the length of this letter, which
addresses a complex topic.
My area of expertise is
child nutrition. I hold graduate and undergraduate degrees in nutrition, a
license to practice nutrition (Massachusetts), registration status from the
Commission on Dietetic Registration, and several years experience working
with children.
I took a public health
curriculum at the University of Hawaii and was well indoctrinated into the
successes of vaccines. The invaluable piece of this education was that few
of my classmates were white, or American. Most were credentialed health
administrators, physicians sent by their governments in the Pacific Rim,
Africa, or Asia to acquire skills for clinical or program decision-making,
such as you influence now. Needless to say I felt both dwarfed and
privileged to have these extraordinary people as classmates. The problems
they faced upon finishing their studies were not in the American experience:
Lack of access to clean water; extreme poverty; rampant malnutrition and
hunger in children; inadequate housing; excessive infant and child mortality
from infectious diseases now rare in the United States.
But here is the problem: As
you know, our own infant mortality rate is worse than many of these
countries. During my graduate days, this was an embarrassment for our public
health officials, and twenty years later, it still is. Although IMR in the
United States has dropped from 11.2 deaths per thousand live births in 1983
to 7.0 in 2000, we cannot exactly celebrate because in the same time frame,
the US ranking against other developed nations worsened dramatically, from
17th in 1983, to 28th in 2000 in spite of the fact that our health cost per
capita has always been highest and still increasing. SIDS is our 3rd most
common cause of infant death.
Policy and practice for
reducing child morbidity and mortality are often driven by maternal and
child nutrition initiatives in the developing world. This link needs
attention in the United States. We cannot say that we do not have child
nutrition problems – indeed, we now have staggering problems that were
unthinkable in the late 1980s, when I was studying health policy and program
goals for the year 2000. The dismal outcomes include a tripling of childhood
obesity and a 104% increase in juvenile diabetes since 1980.
Life-threatening food allergies have doubled and we have seen a six fold
increase in the prevalence of allergies in the last decade. Childhood asthma
has increased 75% and nutrient deficiencies, not seen in decades in US
children are again prevalent.
1 in 10 children carries an
attention deficit designation or diagnosis and last but not least, 1 in 150
children has autism.
I rarely heard of autism
during my studies, but now I am contacted weekly by other nutrition
professionals, not to mention a steady stream of afflicted families, asking
me how to provide therapeutic diets for these children. This has quite sadly
been my specialization since 1999, or 1996 if you count the time I spent
cutting my teeth providing this for my own child. The silver lining here is
that therapeutic diets can work very well for these children. True to the
science that drives maternal and child health programs for WHO, UNICEF, WIC,
School Lunch, or Head Start - children with autism, like any children –
require normal nutrition status to grow and develop as typically as
possible.
Peer review is growing to
corroborate my clinical experience: Children with autism are not usually in
normal nutrition status. Though they may grow (and they often do not grow
typically), they show multiple signs of nutritional failure and compromise.
This is what I fix in my obscure practice, and these children begin to
recover. Usually, they also need a skilled gastroenterologist to resolve
things like impactions, florid gut inflammation, lymphoid hyperplasia,
pancreatic insufficiency, and so on. It is worrisome that pediatric
providers skilled with these problems are few and far between.
My experience and training
has perched me at a cross roads between vaccination policy and nutrition
practice. We need research into the following possibilities, because the
answers may dramatically reduce infant and child morbidity and mortality in
the United States: Vaccines as we dose them today may create nutritional
failure by inflicting early and severe injury to gut tissue and digestive
function, by increasing the risk for bilirubin neurotoxicity at birth, by
setting off inflammatory responses that consume nutrient stores, or
secondarily via brain injuries that impair feeding skill and gut motility.
If vaccines can trigger food
allergies in children, this too creates a large and costly burden: Children
with food allergies have significantly lower height for age and poor intakes
of essential nutrients compared to kids without food allergy; that is, they
don’t grow as well as allergy-free peers, can not learn as well when
malnourished, and may be sick more often. Additional educational services
for these cases will further strain a system already collapsing under the
burden of record numbers of children with autism.
Biased that vaccine injuries
exist only as extremely rare, severe anaphylactic events, and lacking skill
to recognize nutrition failures in children, pediatricians are least
equipped to help the burgeoning generation of sick children they are
arguably creating. I have observed hundreds of children who present with the
same nutrition problems again and again, and whose pediatricians were none
the wiser. I had never encountered problems like these in my training. I do
believe these children are vaccine injured. The injuries are physically
pervasive, affecting immune function, neurological signs, digestion, and
absorption, such that these children do not develop in normal nutrition
status. Their brains do not get to develop typically. The pattern of
physical and developmental demise is the same again and again relative to
exposure to vaccines.
Having followed this issue
for many years, I am aware of the evidence set forth to refute the claim
that vaccines are injurious on a staggering scale, or causing autism. Many
argue that these studies are massaged to cover the horrible possibility.
None of it has changed my mind, just as I am likely not opening yours right
now. We can agree to disagree, but there is no refuting the status of child
health in the United States today. For the first time in US history,
children are more vaccinated - and sicker - than ever before. On balance,
the diseases our children have are no longer infectious, but chronic and
incurable. Is this a good swap? Is it better to get wild type chicken pox,
or to be autistic for life? What do I tell the parents of the three year old
boy who entered my practice last week with a case of shingles that quickly
followed Varicella vaccination, and a new PDD diagnosis? Should I boldly
presume this is only temporal - again?
Our infants die more often
than those in less developed locales the world over. This plus our
humiliating mudslide of poor child health has taken place under the IOM’s
blessing for more, more, and more pediatric vaccines – mercury containing
ones no less. Clearly, at this point, vaccination is not making our children
healthier.
Is it scientifically
reasonable to deny any link, or to believe that all these vaccinations are
truly benign? Massachusetts has a program called REACH to eradicate over-use
of antibiotics. Is it possible to over-use vaccines? Should I suggest this
to the mother whose five year old autistic son – a Make-A-Wish Foundation
recipient – was referred to me to resolve growth failure? He received first
MMR at 12 months, and another dose, mistakenly, at 15 months, rather than at
age 4. The second dose nearly killed him; he never recovered
developmentally. His digestive and immune systems were addled to the core
and he had only months to live. Where will it be noted, for IOM’s awareness,
that this child’s death was caused by over-vaccination, or that health care
resources across Boston’s finest hospitals were wasted in a vain attempt to
repair what a single, redundant, ill-timed dose of MMR had done? If hundreds
of children like this cross my remote threshold, how many other thousands
upon thousands of them exist nationwide? Comparing measles mortality to this
case seems frivolous and pointless. Healthy children in good nutrition
status typically survived measles prior to vaccine availability. I
acknowledge the rate of complication and death for wild type measles in
healthy US children; I do not acknowledge that this exceeds morbidity and
mortality now caused by over-using this and other vaccines.
I must highlight here one of
the new problems demonstrated in our most recent NHANES data: Poor vitamin A
status in an alarming number of US children despite no changes in food
supply. This occurred concomitantly with introduction of MMR vaccination and
increase in vaccines/child. As you know, measles infection depletes vitamin
A stores, and this is a nutrient with documented efficacy, prophylactically
and therapeutically, against measles infection. Is overuse of viral vaccines
like MMR related to vitamin A depletion in US children? Children with poor
vitamin A status have elevated risk overall for infection, as well as more
complications with infection. This is where realities of child nutrition
clash with vaccine policy, and no one seems to be paying attention.
There are many, many
inadequately studied facets of vaccine effects, yet we see our IOM agreeable
to adding more and more vaccine doses to children. Mercury is but one
concern. The fact that individuals vary with respect to kinetics for its
excretion should be just as acceptable to your peers as it is that
individuals vary with rates for metabolizing any drug or excreting any
toxin. Fifty years ago, we knew that pregnant women who experience certain
viral exposures could produce children with autism. Why is it so challenging
then to grasp that multiple neonatal or early infant viral exposures via
vaccination could trigger the same outcome?
A link between multiple live
viral exposures and increased risk of inflammatory bowel disease was
reported over a decade ago in certain population subgroups. The findings
that multiple vaccine-sourced viral exposures delivered in quick succession,
such as is done today in infants and toddlers, may trigger inflammatory
bowel disease with subsequent developmental injury must be explored, not
ignored.
My appeal is made on behalf
of the hundreds of children and families I have had the privilege to serve
in my obscure corner. I should not have this job – I do believe I would be
out of work were it not for current immunization policy and practice. Please
reconvene the Immunization Safety Review Committee with impartial experts
free of allegiance to pharmaceutical companies, who have no fear of the
scientific process no matter what it reveals, and who can accurately review
independent data on vaccines, autism spectrum diagnoses, bowel disease,
allergy, diabetes, asthma, SIDS, and child nutrition status.
On balance, vaccines may now
cause more death, disease, and disability than they prevent in US children.
Reform is urgently needed. I encourage the Vaccine Safety Committee to
consider, without bias or fear, the careful research efforts your colleagues
are making to truthfully resolve this tragic controversy.
Sincerely
Judy Converse, MPH, RD, LD
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