Tag: eczema

Bob Sears Doubles Down Against California Vaccine Laws

Bob Sears wasn’t a fan of SB 277, the vaccine law that removed non-medical exemptions in California.

Not surprisingly, he is actively rallying folks against a new bill that would close a loophole in that law. It seems that some doctors were writing medical exemptions for anything and everything, from eczema to swollen lymph nodes.

Bob Sears is pushing misinformation that SB 276 takes away all medical exemptions.

Of course, the new law wouldn’t take away medical exemptions. It would just take away fake medical exemptions.

Yes, take a long hard look at their list…

A very few actually are actually standard contraindications and precautions to commonly used vaccines, so could likely get you a medical exemption to one or more vaccines. GBS within 6 weeks of a flu shot, a precaution, not a contraindication, would be an example. But even in this case, the exemption would be for flu shots, not all vaccines.

“Events or conditions listed as precautions should be reviewed carefully. Benefits of and risks for administering a specific vaccine to a person under these circumstances should be considered. If the risk from the vaccine is believed to outweigh the benefit, the vaccine should not be administered. If the benefit of vaccination is believed to outweigh the risk, the vaccine should be administered. “
Vaccine Recommendations and Guidelines of the ACIP

What about all of the rest of the diseases or “severe reactions” on Bob’s list, like pneumonia, palpitations, eczema, hair loss, IBD, difficulty swallowing, skin infections, testicular pain, HSP, Multiple Sclerosis, and Kawasaki disease, etc.

These are not vaccine injuries, even though they are sometimes in a package insert. I’m surprised that he didn’t list SIDS and autism too…

And this is why California needs to fix their vaccine law… Folks, including pediatricians, pushing the idea that everything is a vaccine injury.

What is Eczema Vaccinatum?

Did you know that having eczema is a contraindication to getting a vaccine?

Which vaccine?

The smallpox vaccine!

Yes, smallpox has been eradicated, but the vaccine is sometimes still used in very specific situations, especially in the military.

What is Eczema Vaccinatum?

Not only is eczema a contraindication to getting the smallpox vaccine, you shouldn’t even get it if a household contact has eczema.

Why not?

Shedding.

Yes, although anti-vaccine folks needlessly worry about shedding when kids get routine childhood vaccines and even talk about a shedding season, with the smallpox vaccine, problems with shedding are really a thing.

Since the smallpox vaccine is a live virus vaccine and since it very commonly causes a skin reaction at the injection site, shedding can spread it to others. While that’s a good thing with some vaccines, like the oral polio vaccine, because it increases herd immunity, it isn’t with the smallpox vaccine.

If the weakened smallpox vaccine can cause a skin reaction on your arm where you got the shot, what is it going to do if it gets on a child’s skin that is irritated all over with eczema?

An 8-month-old boy with eczema vaccinatum. Photo by CDC/Arthur E. Kaye

It’s a good thing that we don’t routinely have to use the smallpox vaccine anymore.

“Because persons with eczema are deferred from vaccination, only a single, accidentally transmitted case of EV has been described in the medical literature since military vaccination was resumed in the United States in 2002.”
Reed et al on Eczema vaccinatum.

And that it doesn’t happen with any other vaccines!

Learn the Risks of Falling for Anti-Vaccine Propaganda

If you are on the fence or hesitant to vaccinate your kids, it might not be easy to recognize that the vaccine information that you get on some sites is pure propaganda.

That’s unfortunate, because you can’t make an informed choice about vaccines if you are basing that decision on misinformation.

Learn the Risks of Falling for Anti-Vaccine Propaganda

Take the infographic about the number of vaccine doses children in the United States normally get. Learn the risks of following bad advice about vaccines.

It is designed into making you think that kids get 72 doses of vaccines, scaring you and trying to reinforce the myth that kids get too many vaccines.

Have you seen and fallen for that trick? Did you ever think to actually count the total vaccine doses they list? As you can see above, it doesn’t come out to 72 doses…

But why do they do it? If they really think their “vaccines contain toxic chemicals” argument is convincing, then would it matter if the number of vaccine doses was 11 or 53 or 72? Why inflate it to make it wound scarier?

Still, however you want to count the number of doses of vaccines kids get today, one thing is crystal clear – they get protection from more vaccine-preventable diseases.

In 1983, kids may have only have gotten 11 doses of vaccines, but many still died from Hib pneumonia and meningitis, epiglotitis (Hib), pneumococcal pneumonia and meningitis, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, rotavirus, chicken pox, and meningococcemia, etc.

“for those trained in pediatrics in the 1970s, Hib (Haemophilus influenzae type b) was a horror.”

Walter Orenstein, MD

Today, unless you decide to skip or delay your child’s vaccines, they are protected from these diseases.

What about the flu? Kids still die with the flu, but it is important to keep in mind that most kids who die with the flu are unvaccinated.

That’s why it is important to get your kids vaccinated. Don’t take the risk of following bad advice.

What to Know About Learning the Risks of Anti-Vaccine Propaganda

It is important to to learn the risks of falling for anti-vaccine propaganda – leaving your kids unvaccinated, unprotected, and at risk for vaccine-preventable diseases.

Why Are We More Careful About Introducing Baby Food Than Giving Vaccines?

The rules about introducing baby food have changed a lot over the years.

Believe it or not, instead of rice cereal, when your baby is ready for solid foods, you can now give her fruits, veggies, meat, or even peanut butter. That’s right, infants can have peanut butter!

baby boy cake child — Let them eat cake, but don’t let that be your baby’s first food… Photo by Henley Design Studio on Pexels.com

In fact, if your baby has eczema, your pediatrician will likely encourage you to introduce peanut butter early, by four to six months, as a way to hopefully avoid peanut allergies later in life.

Why Are We More Careful About Introducing Baby Food Than Giving Vaccines?

Those are some big changes, aren’t they.

Still, a lot of other things stayed the same, including that parents should:

wait until at least four months, and often until six months, before they think about starting solid foods
only give one new food at a time

So while there are few restrictions on which foods to give now (still no honey before age 12 months and no choke foods), you still want to introduce one new food every three or four days to watch for a reaction.

Why is that different than for vaccines?

It’s because reactions to foods are more common, especially non-allergic type reactions (diarrhea, gas, and fussiness, etc), but also because there is basically no risk to delaying the introduction of new foods by this slow method.

There is also no real benefit to going much faster. Do you really want to introduce your baby to multiple new foods a day?

In addition to allergies and intolerances, there is another type of reaction you are watching for too – your baby simply not liking the food. For example, if one of your baby’s first foods is an apple, strawberry, beet combo puree and he spits it out at the first taste, how are you going to know which flavor he didn’t like? Isn’t it better to go through all of the single ingredient first foods before mixing them up?

Now if you did the same thing with vaccines, your baby would be getting a shot every four days! And it would leave them unprotected for a lot longer period of time.

Considering that serious vaccine reactions are rare, it is easy to understand that there is no benefit to only giving one vaccine at a time and we recommend that folks stick to the standard immunization schedule.

What to Know About Giving Vaccines and Introducing Baby Food

Although it is like comparing peas with peach mango and oatmeal cereal, stick to your pediatricians advice about vaccines and introducing baby food.

America’s New Normal: Propaganda About the Unhealthiest Generation

My son started to have migraines when he was about 11 years old.

Must be stress, BPA, poor eating habits, all of the screen time, or vaccines, right?

“Americans spend the least on food, the most on health care, have the most highly vaccinated kids, and have the sickest kids of any industrialized country. More kids than not are now chronically ill, developmentally delayed, and eating or injecting prescription medications from cradle to grave – which is going to be a quicker trip for them than it was for their parents, according to data on life expectancy in the US. We are inured to childhood autism, epilepsy, allergy, asthma, diabetes, obesity, Crohn’s disease and cancer. We are dying younger. We are going backwards.”

Judy Converse on America’s New Normal: Chronically Ill Kids

That likely seems like a young age to get migraines and would fit well with the narrative that kids today are part of the unhealthiest generation ever.

Except that I started to get migraines at about the same age, and so did my mother. Like many of the other conditions that seem to be ballooning today, migraines have a genetic component.

The Unhealthiest Generation?

The CDC has long kept statistics on everything from asthma and cancer rates to diabetes and life expectancy rates and helps folks see how healthy kids really are today.

Who says that today’s kids are part of the unhealthiest generation ever?

Mostly anti-vaccine folks who blame vaccines for making kids unhealthy and alternative medical providers who think their holistic remedies will fix all of the problems they see in our unhealthy kids who they claim are full of “toxins.”

Toxins? If you are going to believe that our kids are all sick, then you have to buy into the narrative that toxins are everywhere, especially in vaccines, and they are making kids sick.

Of course, none of that is true.

Vaccines are safe and work to prevent us from getting sick and there are 2 to 3 million fewer deaths in the world each year because people are vaccinated and protected.

“From developing groundbreaking treatments for deadly chronic diseases to saving babies who are born premature, pediatric researchers have increased the ability of children to live full and fulfilling lives that only a few decades before would have been tragically cut short.”

Sandra G. Hassink, MD on the 7 Great Achievements in Pediatric Research

And today’s kids, all 73.6 million of them in the United States, aren’t the unhealthiest. They are actually a very healthy generation, being born with the lowest child and infant mortality rates ever, low rates of hospitalizations, and one of the highest life expectancies in history.

Our Healthy Kids

How do we know today’s kids are healthy?

One easy way is to compare them to kids in the past…

If you have only been listening to the alarmists who talk about the unhealthiest generation all of the time, you likely wouldn’t know that:

while 2.6% of kids were thought to be in fair or poor health in 1991, that is down to just 1.8% today (2015)
fewer kids today (4.5%) report having had an asthma attack in the previous year than they did in 1997 (5.4%), and that fewer kids have asthma today (8.5%) than in 2003 (8.7%)
since 1997, fewer children, whether or not they have insurance, are visiting the emergency room
fewer children are requiring overnight hospital stays, down from 5.5% to just 2.1% today (2015)
rates of hay fever or respiratory allergy are down since 1997, from 17.5% of kids to 15.6% of kids today (2015)
rates of epilepsy have been stable in children for at least 40 years
fewer kids have multiple ear infections since 1997, when 7.1% of kids had 3 or more ear infections, to just 5% of kids today (2015)
fewer kids are being prescribed antibiotics
childhood cancer rates have been rising, but only slightly, and mortality rates have been declining
suicide rates are rising, but only from historic lows – they used to be about the same or higher in the early 1990s

Of course, some conditions are on the rise, including ADHD, type 1 diabetes, food allergies, eczema, obesity, and most autoimmune diseases.

“A few conditions have decreased because of prevention (eg, lead encephalopathy), a few represent relatively new conditions (eg, human immunodeficiency virus type 1 infection), and some have increased after dramatic improvements in survival for individually low-prevalence childhood conditions that previously had high fatality rates (eg, leukemia, cystic fibrosis, congenital heart diseases). Most growth, however, reflects dramatic increases in incidence of a few high-prevalence conditions.”

James M. Perrin, MD on The Increase of Childhood Chronic Conditions in the United States

And autism rates have been up, but we mostly know why.

“…the numbers of people born with autism aren’t necessarily increasing dramatically. It’s just that we’re getting better and better at counting them.”

Emily Willingham

Although we don’t know why most other conditions are trending up (it isn’t vaccines), we will hopefully continue to develop new theories and reverse those trends.

It should be reassuring that many of the trends do show that our kids are indeed healthy.

What to Know About Our Healthy Kids

From gun violence and climate change to the threat of emerging infections, out children do face many threats and are certainly under a lot of stress. There is no evidence that this is the unhealthiest generation though. If anything, they are on track to be one of the healthiest.

Can Vaccines Cause Eczema?

Eczema, or atopic dermatitis, can be hard to control.

That’s one of the things that is so frustrating about it.

It’s also often hard to figure out what exactly is triggering a child’s eczema. Is it the soap you are using, your child’s clothes, or something he eat or drank?

What Causes Kids to Have Eczema?

Another frustrating thing for parents, and pediatricians, is that we really don’t know what usually causes kids to have eczema in the first place.

Was it the soap you are using, your child’s clothes, or something he eat or drank?

“Research suggests that genes are the determining causes of eczema and other atopic diseases. This means that you are more likely to have atopic dermatitis, food allergies, asthma and/or hayfever if your parents or other family members have ever had eczema.”

Mark Boguniewicz, MD on What Causes Eczema

Unfortunately, simply knowing that eczema is genetic doesn’t make it any less frustrating for many people.

“There is emerging evidence that inflammation in atopic dermatitis is associated with immune-mediated and inherited abnormalities in the skin barrier.”

Amy Stanway, MD on Causes of atopic dermatitis

You can avoid likely triggers, including harsh soaps and dry skin, etc., and learn the best ways to care for your baby’s skin though.

Can Vaccines Cause Eczema?

Why do some folks associate vaccines with eczema?

“It is unusual for an infant to be affected with atopic dermatitis before the age of four months but they may suffer from infantile seborrhoeic dermatitis or other rashes prior to this.”

Amy Stanway, MD on Atopic Dermatitis

It’s easy to understand when you realize that 60% of kids with eczema have their first symptoms before their first birthday and for some, the first symptoms start around the time an infant is just over four months old.

Many baby rashes, especially if they started before 4 months, are probably not eczema. (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Did your baby have bad skin before four months?

Many do, but they usually don’t have eczema. In the first week or two, newborn rashes like infantile seborrheic dermatitis and neonatal acne continue to worsen, until they reach a peak at about age six weeks. It isn’t until about three or four months that baby’s begin to have good skin. Unless they start to develop eczema…

So, since the eczema symptoms start after a child’s four or six months shots, then it must be the vaccines, right?

While the correlation is obvious, that obviously doesn’t prove that vaccines cause eczema.

“Vaccinations do NOT cause eczema.”

Amy Paller, MD on Do vaccines cause eczema?

And, not surprisingly, several studies (listed below) prove that they don’t.

A large study of vaccinated vs unvaccinated children, Vaccination Status and Health in Children and Adolescents Findings of the German Health Interview and Examination Survey for Children and Adolescents (KiGGS), also found that “the prevalence of allergic diseases and non-specific infections in children and adolescents was not found to depend on vaccination status.”

Can Vaccine Ingredients Trigger Eczema?

Now that we know that vaccines don’t actually cause eczema, what about the idea that vaccines can make a child’s eczema worse?

That’s actually true, but only for the smallpox vaccine.

If someone with eczema gets vaccinated with vaccinia, the smallpox vaccine, or is recently exposed to someone who was vaccinated, they could develop eczema vaccinatum. Fortunately, since smallpox was eradicated, very few people get the smallpox vaccine anymore.

And back before smallpox was eradicated, they actually developed an attenuated version of the smallpox vaccine that could safely be used in kids with eczema!

Other vaccines are not thought to trigger or worsen eczema.

“Parents of atopic children should be encouraged to fully immunize their children.”

Grüber et al on Early atopic disease and early childhood immunization–is there a link?

While many kids with eczema do have food allergies and some vaccines do contain some residual food proteins, including eggs and milk, it is very rare for them to trigger food allergy reactions.

If this has you concerned, remember that even kids with egg allergies can now get the flu shot, and while many kids with eczema have food allergies, the food allergy isn’t usually thought to make their eczema worse. As part of the atopic march, they just have both – food allergies and eczema. Some also have hayfever or asthma.

In addition to your pediatrician, a pediatric allergist can help you with any remaining concerns about eczema and vaccines. A pediatric dermatologist can also be helpful if you are having a hard time getting your child’s eczema under control.

What to Know About Vaccines and Eczema

Vaccines don’t cause eczema and except for the smallpox vaccine, they won’t make your child’s eczema worse. Experts recommend that kids with eczema be fully vaccinated.

VAXOPEDIA

Bob Sears Doubles Down Against California Vaccine Laws

More on Bob Sears and California Vaccine Laws