Letter to IOM
President Fineberg by Judy
Converse, MPH, RD, LD - March
17, 2007
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 |