Parenting: Are So Many Shots for Baby Safe?

For parents concerned about vaccines and the possibility of harm they may do, the newest research tests the “too many, too soon” theory, and encourages us to put it to rest. Today the central worry questions the large number of vaccines given, and how many are given at one time, especially when they’re being administered to the vulnerable bodies of very young children. The new study, published online April 1 in the Journal of Pediatrics, found no relationship between the increased exposure to vaccines and autism. As the number of recommended childhood vaccinations has grown over the decades, so have autism spectrum disorder (ASD) diagnoses – and in the public mind, the two have been difficult to separate. Fifteen years ago, a now-discredited paper first started the controversy around vaccines and autism. That study described eight children who developed autism after receiving the measles, mumps, rubella (MMR) vaccine. In big scarlet letters, “RETRACTED” now appears across that paper on the website of the prestigious British medical journal, The Lancet, which refuted the paper in 2010. In 2004, the Institute of Medicine (IOM), the health arm of the nonprofit National Academy of Sciences, concluded from its review of evidence that neither the MMR vaccine nor thimerosal, a preservative that is another focus of parents’ concern, causes autism. Yet about a third of parents still have doubts about vaccine safety, and one survey found that more than 10 percent of parents delay or refuse vaccinations, most of those believing that it’s safer to delay than to administer them according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) schedule. It’s an issue that’s alive and well in our own community, judging from the discussions on GardenMoms, the 8,700-member strong online parenting group in the Boston metro area. Parents asking for doctors who are sympathetic to alternative vaccination schedules will find that commenters in the group can easily provide those referrals.  Consider that two-year-olds today should have received a total of about two dozen shots and as many as five jabs in a visit to the doctor’s office, for protection from 13 separate diseases. In comparison, their parents as babies were likely immunized against seven illnesses. We’ve seen eradication of smallpox and we’re oh, so close on polio, thanks to vaccines. Yet with the volumes of anti-vaccine information available to 21st century parents, it’s no surprise that they’re wondering about the wisdom of that difference. But according to the new research – which was a secondary analysis of existing data on 1,008 children who were born in the years 1994 to ’99 – there was no increased risk of developing autism, as the babies in the study […]

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