The vaccination debate is one in which I fence-sit. I have done mountains of research (I even have a minor in microbiology from my Bachelor of Science degree), and in the end our decision whether to vaccinate or not basically came from our inability to make a decision, hence our littlies are not vaccinated.
A huge part of our decision making came down to family history though. Both my sister and I had nasty responses to the whooping cough vaccine. I almost died when I stopped breathing, and my sister has a lifelong skin condition that has been potentially linked to her receiving the vaccine. Because of that we were nervous about what potential side effects our own kids might have.
Another factor we took into account was the family history of children being on the autistic spectrum in both mine and DH's family. Almost all the boys in both families (our siblings and cousins) are on the spectrum to some degree. Whilst most literature today states that there is no link between vaccination and autism directly, we were unconvinced that there is no indirect link. In fact, we went to see a doctor that specialises in Behavioural and Spectrum Disorders in children who is a qualified DAN practitioner and has lots of experience discovering the causative aetiology behind the development of such disorders. When we discussed our concerns with him and described our family history his final recommendation was to definitely not get the MMR vaccine. He did say that the other vaccines should be fine for my son, but we obviously had other concerns with the whooping cough vaccine. When I asked him to explain how the vaccine might indirectly contribute to autism he gave me a pretty good explanation, and also explained how it meant that the research into vaccines was able to say there is no direct link between the vaccine and autism. But please remember that I am not an autism spectrum specialist nor a vaccine specialist, so my recounting of his explanation may not be perfect. He basically told me that the genetics of some children make them pre-disposed to regressive autism. Regressive austism is where the child develops normally for a period of time and then regresses (usually around 18months to 3 years of age) and is then diagnosed as being on the autistic spectrum. He described the disposition as being like a genetic switch. In many children that switch will never be switched and the child will never become autistic. In other children something can occur to cause the switch to be switched. He believes that the effect the MMR vaccine in particular has on the body of a child can sometimes cause a response that triggers that switch. So while the vaccine itself doesn't cause the autism, the vaccine triggers a process that does cause the autism.
So after all our research we have not vaccinated, and while I still wonder if we've done the right thing, the amazing health of my son strengthens our belief that we are doing the right thing. He is the healthiest child I have ever seen. About 6 months ago my two stepsons (who have both been fully vaccinated) got whooping cough and one of them had a terribly nasty cough and was home from school for about 2 months. Even my DH got a bit of a cough for a week or so. While we were pretty diligent about hygiene and semi-quarantining the sick from the healthy, we were still all living in the same house. Both myself and my son who are unvaccinated were the only two not to get whooping cough. This led me to research why the three fully vaccinated people in the house would catch it and I found this answer:
That obviously doesn't ecplain why my son and I didn't catch it, but I put that down to good immune systems
~Stoked~ - I read a few pages back that your immunity level had gone up for rubella and you were unsure why. It's possible that in the year since you had the levels tested you may have come into contact with someone that had rubella and you may have contracted some of the virus. Because you already had some immunity your immune system would have very quickly recognised the virus and set to work combatting it. This means you may have had the virus briefly without even knowing it. But this brief exposure would have boosted your immunity levels again.
Hmmm, I'm sure that there was something else I was planning on writing, but over the course of the last 5 hours that it took me to write this in between looking after the kids, I've totally forgotten what it was, lol.
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