Below is a note from Joseph Hattersley, Co-author of THE INFANT SURVIVAL GUIDE: Protecting Your Baby from the Dangers of Crib Death, Vaccines and Other Environmental Hazards, in response to the recent debate that has been going on about the cause of SIDS.

Preface

Thank you, Dr. Mercola, for engaging others in a debate with Dr.Sprott and me on SIDS and toxic gases.

As repartee I offer Chapter 6 on Vaccinations and Crib Death from The Infant Survival Guide by Dr. Lendon H. Smith, MD, with Joseph Hattersley, MA. There we show that vaccinations do obviously cause some crib deaths, and we cite some of the same sources as Dawn Winkler.

Might those babies have been saved by protection from toxic gases? No way to know. In the chapter we present Viera Scheibner's diagrams -- unfortunately they do not show up on electronic mail -- and they do confirm that crib deaths occurred on days of breathing crisis as detected by her accurate device.

Two sources that we cite in the chapter show that after certain vaccinations there are repeated febrile (with fever) episodes, and crib death occurred on such days. Isn't it plausible to suppose that a day of breathing crisis would also be a day of fever? Isn't that possibility worth exploring? Would it be too hard for Viera to add a thermometer to her breathing monitor? Technically, I recognize that it would be; but clever technicians might figure out how to do it.

The test of this occurs in New Zealand. Most, but not all of the 2½ million Pakeha (people of Caucasian origin) in New Zealand protect their babies from toxic gases. They use either BabeSafe® or proper mattress wrapping. They get about the same amount of vaccination as typical American babies.

And can there be any doubt that vaccinations that cause breathing crises (with fevers) in Viera's test subjects in Australia -- must also cause the same breathing crises, with fevers, in New Zealand? Yet among those babies protected against toxic gases in either manner, there has been not one reported crib death. And the opposition to the toxic gas theory is so strong, if there ever were one exception, the media would trumpet it for all to read.

Replying to AAPS, it is not true that only a small number of states allow parents to claim exemption from vaccinations. They need only visit Joseph Mercola's web site www.mercola.com, cited in our Chapter 6, to learn that all but two states do allow exemptions. Dr. Mercola kindly provides application procedures for each state, including ways to avoid the dreaded hepatitis B vaccine in the delivery room, ahead of time.

Cordially, Joseph Hattersley

The Infant Survival Guide

Chapter Six

Vaccinations and Toxic Gases

Some tell us with seeming authority that "immunizations" are a good thing. For example, in Parade Magazine for January 9, 2000, Isadore Rosenfeld, MD, writes "Don't Worry About Vaccinations" Yet to discerning eyes, the picture all around us is worse than disquieting. Why do vaccinations cause such calamitous results?

Some of the ingredients of our current vaccines [there's space in this compact book to detail only two] are:

(1) Formaldehyde, used in production of resins, plastics, and foam insulation, and as a preservative, disinfectant, and antibacterial food additive. It is a known carcinogen (can initiate a new cancer), commonly used to embalm corpses.

(2) Thimerosal, a mercury derivative. The heavy metal mercury is toxic to the central nervous system and not easily eliminated from the body. "Aluminum, formaldehyde and mercury" -- including the mercury in "silver" dental fillings and amalgams (see Chapter 9)-"have a long history of documented hazardous effects including cancer, neurological damage" such as multiple sclerosis, Lou Gehrig's disease, "and death."

Studies report, "Thimerosal inhibits phagocytes, one of the body's most vital immune defenses in blood." Then what effect will it have on healthy human cells after it is injected into the bloodstream? Jamie Murphy, a concerned nonprofessional observer asks, "Who would take chemicals that are carcinogenic in rats, are used in the manufacture of inks, dyes, explosives, wrinkle-proof fabrics, home insulation, and embalming fluid -- and inject them into the delicate body of a baby?"

Among other vaccine ingredients are aluminum phosphate, aluminum adjuvants, alum, and acetone; phenol is included in allergy injections. "Benzoic acid, a preservative whose injection into rats causes tremors, convulsions, and death, is added. And then vaccine makers add decomposing animal proteins, such as pig or horse blood, cow pox pus, rabbit brain tissue, duck egg protein, and dog kidney tissue."

A glance at further steps in vaccine making is no less disturbing. To produce a "live"-virus vaccine, such as MMR (measles/mumps/rubella), the virus is passed through animal tissue several times to reduce its potency. Measles virus is passed through chick embryos, polio virus through monkey kidney, and the rubella virus is passed through the dissected organs of an aborted human fetus.

'Killed' vaccines are 'inactivated' through heat, radiation, or chemicals." "The weakened germ is then strengthened with antibody boosters and stabilizers. This is done by addition of drugs, antibiotics and toxic disinfectants: neomycin, streptomycin, sodium chloride, sodium hydroxide, aluminum hydroxide, aluminum hydrochloride, sorbitol, hydrolyzed gelatin, formaldehyde [again], and Thimerosal [again]."

Injected straight into the child's bloodstream -- bypassing the cellular immune system, one-half of our protective immunity mechanism, those materials destroy stores of protective nutrients in the tiny body. So it is not hard to see why epidemic vaccines worsen health throughout life.

Baby and mother are home from the hospital now. Mom already knows, from Chapter 2, how to protect her precious little one from crib death by toxic gases. But that is by no means the end of the story.

Soon baby's pediatrician will probably suggest vaccinations, and a lot of them. In fact, inoculations began right after birth in the hospital (Hepatitis B) unless the parents obtained a waiver ahead of time. This they can do before another birth by following instructions from Dr. Joseph Mercola's Internet web site. See Resources at the end of this book.

But what of the scores of other vaccines the pediatrician is likely to press on the parents? For babies who are protected from toxic gases using the techniques explored in Chapter 2, vaccinations are only an indirect factor for delayed SIDS death. Here we will explore how this new factor fits into the SIDS equation.

For babies who are exposed to those toxic gases, vaccines are a terribly serious risk. The fevers they create, promoting higher toxic gas generation, may recur immediately or at known, predictable intervals afterward, or both. Either way, risk rises sharply on those days if the mattress is generating the gases. (Diagrams from Viera S. Scheibner, PhD, with her permission. Scheibner VS. Vaccination: 100 Years of Orthodox Research Shows that Vaccines Represent a Medical Assault on the Immune System. Blackheath, NSW 2785: Australian Print Group, 1993.) No one before Viera Scheibner had ever examined all the published evidence on vaccinations. Most important, no one had studied even a considerable part of the record without prejudgment in its favor.

Researchers and physicians, worldwide, who are unaware of toxic gases or are not convinced by the evidence they have seen, have made a strong case indicting vaccines as the primary cause of SIDS. The rate at which American babies die in their first year of life has consistently risen since the 1950s when mass "immunization" campaigns began. Our infant mortality ranks twenty-second in the world: twenty-one countries, most of whom vaccinate a lot less, keep their babies alive through the first year better than America. Today, infant mortality rates in some U.S. cities match those in developing countries. Also, the general health of children has worsened.

Sidebar: In Chapter 2 we showed that America's crib death rate surged more than four hundred-fold after 1950 when manufacturers began to put fire-retardant chemicals into babies' mattresses. There are now around three thousand such deaths per year. But the increase in SIDS accounts for only a small part of the entire worsening in infant mortality.

So are vaccinations the cause of crib death?

In 1979 a DPT vaccination campaign in Tennessee caused eight cases of SIDS. The evidence led the U.S. Surgeon General to stop the use of the particular lot of vaccine. DPT is diphtheria/pertussis (whooping cough)/tetanus. Of the three, the pertussis segment appears to be the most dangerous.

In 1975, when Japanese health authorities delayed DPT vaccination from two months to two years of age, two important changes were observed.

• First, babies' whooping cough mortality dropped sharply. The triple-antigen shot was supposed to prevent the disease, but had shifted it into their first year, when it is life threatening.
  

• Second, SIDS incidence in Japan, which had always been low, declined by 85 to 95 percent. As mentioned in Chapter 2, infant bedding used in Japan into the 1970s did not emit toxic gases. That fact explained Japan's previously low crib death rate.
  

The typical chronology -- the story of what happened -- and pathology of SIDS babies after DPT contrasts sharply to the paucity of symptoms in most gas crib death. "Pathology findings included petechiae (spot-like bleeding) of lung, pleura, pericardium and thymus; vascular congestion, pulmonary and brain edema, and pneumonitis." William Torch, MD, wrote of seizures after DPT, shock, lethargy, apathy, coma, decerebrate-decorticate rigidity, spasticity, and hypotonia or paralysis, among others. We need not struggle to define all those scary sounding terms.

"Death occurred mostly in sleep in healthy allergy-free infants after a brief period of irritability, crying, lethargy, upper respiratory tract symptoms, and sleep disturbance." Hundreds of American parents confirmed that series of events; many also reported long periods of high-pitched screaming after DPT.

Of special importance are the second day after DPT vaccination and days 5, 6 and 8, 11, 13 to 16, and 18 to 21. In all groups, each death appeared to have been precipitated by unanimous, vaccination-caused breathing crises: apnea and hypopnea. The statistical correlation was perfect. Hypopnea is low volume, typically only 5 percent of unstressed breathing; apnea is repeated interruptions in respiration.

The children monitored after DPT were not together. Yet, reminiscent of marching soldiers they all experienced apnea/hypopnea episodes on the identically numbered days starting from day 0 of vaccination. Fatalities diagnosed as SIDS after DPT recounted by Marie Griffin, MD, in New England Journal of Medicine in 1988 and by three other authors also fell on the same identically numbered days as those reported by Dr. Scheibner.

Looking back to an earlier time, during the 1970s in the Northern Territory of Australia, growing routine "immunization" programs more than tripled infant mortality among mostly aboriginal people, to the genocidal level of five hundred per thousand. Of these deaths an extremely high proportion were declared to have been SIDS.

Although stated elsewhere in this book, the role of vitamin C merits repetition. Scholars attributed these Australian crib deaths to subclinical scurvy, deficiency of vitamin C not sufficient to be detected by conventional laboratory tests. It had been suddenly brought to life-threatening crisis by the immune-stressing vaccines. "In American SIDS autopsies, pathologists typically reported 'no evidence of vitamin C deficiency.' But under their microscopes they saw inflammation, clusters of macrophages [immune system scavenger cells], excess secretion of mucus in larynx, and much more. Deficiency of vitamin C explains all these."

Robert F. Cathcart III, MD, probably the world's greatest authority in clinical use of vitamin C, labeled subclinical scurvy anascorbemia. So low a level, he showed, can lead the heart to simply quit functioning after vaccines destroy any trace of ascorbate in the baby's body. Sudden death from scurvy has been known for centuries in adults (Chapter 3).

Present-day practitioners and up-to-date nutritionists use the entire vitamin C complex, including a variety of bioflavonoids (see Chapter 3 and Resources). Ascorbic acid is only one important segment of the complex.

How did giving vitamin C prevent crib death? Dr. Jim Sprott explains that the acidity of babies' urine, dribble, sweat, vomit, etc. from consumption of ascorbic acid reverses the alkalinity, required to enable fungi such as S. brevicaulis to generate those neurotoxic gases.

Each vaccination raises the baby's temperature, multiplying gas generation in the crib if the baby is not protected against it, and hence worsening risk of death by gas poisoning. A rise in the bedding temperature close to baby's body from 98.6oF to 104oF can increase gas generation ten-fold or more. In 1972, P.J. Landrigan, MD, and J.J. Witte, MD, reported febrile (with fever) convulsions on days 3, 7 to 10, 13, 15, 18, and 25 after measles vaccination (which is now part of MMR, see below). Other researchers reported derangement of body temperature control after a variety of vaccines.

For babies protected by BabeSafe® or by a properly wrapped mattress, these fevers pass harmlessly with normal treatment. But for infants who are not so protected, vaccinations increase toxic gas exposure and SIDS risk directly. They also elevate crib death risk indirectly by weakening immunity and increasing incidence of fever-generating asthma and other diseases -- as does pediatricians' overuse of antibiotics (Chapter 8).

Although Dr. Scheibner measured only breathing, there can be little doubt that fevers also rose on the days of apnea and hypopnea. If a baby's mattress was generating toxic gases, risk of being killed by them was high on each of those days. The infection-caused fever incited by a vaccine would generate a higher, more dangerous concentration of toxic gases. In sum, Dr. Scheibner estimates "this unscientific, useless, harmful and invasive procedure" causes half of crib deaths, which some have renamed "Sudden Immunization Death Syndrome."

Dr. Sprott reinterprets: "Half of all cot death babies have been recently vaccinated -- an entirely different point, as any epidemiologist would know." Epidemiologists study all the elements contributing to the occurrence or non-occurrence of a disease in a population.

Contrary to repetitive claims crediting vaccinations for eliminating infectious diseases, such diseases declined almost to zero before vaccinations began. Typically, a disease was already near the end of its decline and the rate of improvement did not then accelerate. Major infectious diseases shrank away as nutrition, public health measures, and sanitation built up; and they declined equally in areas where mass vaccinations were never applied. Where those conditions did not improve, vaccination programs did nothing to disease incidence.

From the records of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, from 1911 to 1935 the four leading causes of death from infectious diseases in the U.S. were diphtheria, scarlet fever, whooping cough and measles. By 1945 the combined death rate from these causes had declined by 95 percent-before the implementation of mass vaccination programs.

The greatest factors in the decline of diphtheria, scarlet fever and whooping cough were sanitation through public health measures including, notably, clean drinking water, improved nutrition, and better housing with less crowded conditions.

Now for the long-term effects: vaccinations weaken our immune systems. Humans have two kinds of immunity.

(1) The humeral immune system (or Th2 function) produces antibodies, specialized defense proteins, to recognize, neutralize and actually remember antigens, i.e. unfriendly foreign particles in the body.

(2) The cell-mediated (Th1 function) immune system involves white blood cells and specialized immune cells known as macrophages ("big eaters"), which gobble up antigens clearing them from the body. These hungry cells function in the thymus, tonsils, adenoids, spleen, lymph nodes, and the lymph system. (The lymph system throughout the body disposes of the body's garbage.) This causes skin rashes and discharges of pus and mucus from throat and lungs -- typical signs of the beneficial acute inflammatory illnesses of childhood.

These two poles of the immune system have a reciprocal relationship. When the humeral pole is over stimulated, as from vaccines or allergies, the cell-mediated pole tends to be relatively inactive. Vaccines do not stimulate this pole, and so their contents never get discharged from the body. The humeral immune system needs to be tempered by the cell-mediated response, and this best happens during infectious childhood diseases.

Sidebar: Louis Pasteur was a very great microbiologist. But he made one grievous error, and the results continue to bedevil us. For one thing, vaccinations are based on Pasteur's fallacious germ theory. If only health professionals had understood the cellular terrain theory of Pasteur's 19th century contemporary, Antoine Bechamp. Mosquitoes seek stagnant water, but do not cause it. Likewise, disease organisms already lurk inside the body or enter the body after exposure, as during a flu epidemic.

Just as wolves seek sick deer as easy prey for dinner, disease organisms become hostile when terrain -- cellular condition -- shifts. I.e., when it weakens. The eminent analytical chemist E. Douglas Hume, in the foreword to his book Bechamp or Pasteur? A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology , expresses the concept. It explodes the germ theory and the basis of vaccination.

In recent Congressional testimony, a retired medical doctor who wishes to remain unidentified said,

My final comments are drawn from my 27 years of experience as a general practitioner of medicine. Twenty-three of those years were in a rural farming community in upstate New York where as many as 50 percent of my pediatric patients were unvaccinated due to their parents' conscientious personal choice.

For 23 years, I observed my young patients grow from infancy to young adulthood and appraised their overall health and vitality. My unvaccinated children were healthier, hardier and more robust than their vaccinated peers. Allergies, asthma and pallor, and behavioral and attention disturbances were clearly more common in my young patients who had been vaccinated.

The growing incidence and severity of asthma seem to be related more to the suppression or absence of respiratory infections because of vaccinations and antibiotics, than to the commonly perceived cause, air pollution. Highly polluted European cities where antibiotics and vaccines are used far less than in the US have lower asthma rates than comparable US cities. And in Tucson, Arizona, with dry heat and lack of irritants in the air, the rate of asthma is the same as elsewhere in the country.

More than one-third of Americans report allergies and food sensitivities. But children who received a minimum of antibiotics and a minimum of early childhood vaccinations have 40 percent lower than average risk of developing allergies/food sensitivities. Explosions in asthma similar to America's developed also in Europe, Australia and Japan. The cause: lack of acute inflammatory responses and discharges in childhood, i.e., lack of childhood diseases.

Hepatitis B vaccine causes 120 times more illnesses and deaths than the disease. "The recommendation to vaccinate was not based on any perceived risk of widespread hepatitis among children, but because the vaccine became available."

Measles vaccine causes adverse neurologic conditions, mental retardation and much more. Vaccinations, as well as antibiotics, have increased SIDS-risky otitis media (middle ear infections), which can lead to autism. They have increased cancer and much more.

Now a new shock. At least for genetically vulnerable children, the live-cell MMR (measles/mumps/rubella) vaccine, used since 1977, not only might promote encephalitis, diabetes, and Crohn's disease. It also may cause autism. Natural medicine practitioner Joseph Mercola, DO, tells of "at least six children with autism who were 100 percent normal until they got the MMR vaccine."

Here is a typical case, from recent testimony by a father to a packed hearing room in Washington, DC. This was the House of Representatives Committee on the Dangers of Vaccinations, chaired by Congressman Dan Burton. The audience's reaction afterward: dead silence.

Russell began his life a normal, healthy, robust child, meeting all his age appropriate milestones. At seven months old -- within 72 hours after receiving his third DPT and his first Hib (Haemophilus influenzae) vaccinations -- Russell developed a high fever and shrieked with a high wailing scream for days.

After these vaccinations, he started losing eye contact, smiling less, losing interest in people, developed constant croup and was chronically sick. At seven months old, Russell's life had begun to change along with the lives of all who know and love him. Within days after his first MMR vaccination at 18 months old, Russell began his final journey into the abyss of what my wife and I now know as autism -- losing most of his remaining skills, developing severe sleep irregularities, chronic gastrointestinal problems, and expressing constant pain by harrowing days of endless crying. He was officially diagnosed at two and a half years old with autism."

The six- to eight-fold increase in autism in the U.S. and Britain from 1977 to date is not a coincidence. Before that, its incidence had been about constant for thirty years. The live cell MMR vaccine appears to create the condition by a complex web of reactions in the body including "leaky gut," which in turn makes the brain "leaky." The so-called blood brain barrier -- which does not even exist in the fetus -- derives from the same embryonic origin as the gut epithelium, the lining. It does not protect the brain nearly as well as was long thought, but can be modulated in an ongoing way to respond to environmental stimuli.

Sidebar: Intestinal absorption of large particles. The following draws heavily on Ray Peat's Newsletter, January 1998, pages 1-5, by Raymond Peat, PhD (chemistry), a world authority.

Gerhard Volkheimer rediscovered the principle called persorption in the 1960s; it had first been found a century earlier. "Even the normal intestine is able to permit passage of large molecules and particles, in many cases larger than the cells that line the intestine. Scientists demonstrated this, using particles of plastic; starch grains -- which are sometimes several times larger than blood cells -- and many other materials. One of those is carrageenan." None of Dr. Peat's physiology professors, when he was in college, were aware of this phenomenon. We visit potentially mischievous carrageen again in Chapter 8.

A seemingly low-grade, long-term immune reaction -- a homeostasis, i.e. a stable condition -- of ill health precedes the devastating condition autism. Andrew Wakefield, MD, a conventional, mainline British gastroenterologist, drew heavy medical and public health reprisals by publishing the following research. The children brought to him for study of digestive system troubles had, like Russell in his father's testimony before a Congressional committee, developed normally until they were given MMR. One sixteen-month-old baby developed autism from the measles component of MMR, which is given at 12 to 15 months of age, possibly not early enough to promote crib death.

Other studies question the relationship of MMR vaccinations to autism. See Appendix at the end of this book.

Polio and Hib vaccines may be administered at the same doctor or nurse contacts where other vaccines are given. When viruses are mixed together -- DPT is itself a mixture -- they can cause dangerous hybrid viruses. Some combined vaccines, given in months two, four and six when SIDS risk is at a peak (that would be perfect timing if the aim were to achieve the worst possible SIDS death rate), can multiply unpredictable neurotoxic viral infections.

Sidebar: What is the difference between a virus and a bacterium? "The typical virus is a non-living microbe made of nucleic acid DNA, or a photocopy of DNA called RNA within a protein envelope, and sometimes even a tiny membrane. These molecules are all made entirely by human cells inside a human body. A virus reproduces by entering a living cell and commandeering [taking over] the cell's resources in order to make new virus particles, a process that ends with the disintegration of the dead cell."

A bacterium, in contrast, reproduces by simple cell division. Some bacteria cause diseases such as pneumonia and tuberculosis. Others serve necessary functions in the body. Our trillions of "friendly" gut bacteria strengthen immunity, generate needed vitamins, and serve other important functions; see Chapter 8.

Injected at different times into mice, two herpes simplex viruses were harmless. But when both were given together, 70 percent of the mice died. Their bodies contained eleven new viruses, of which eight were neurotoxic. "Some viruses use a 'team approach.' One by itself may be relatively benign but combination with other viruses 'helps' the first one cause, e.g., cancer." There is no way to predict what interactions may develop among the many patent drugs that elderly Americans take. "In the same way, no one can know what viral combinations result from the many vaccines injected into children and what is in the final 'soup.'"

About 98 percent of DNA sequences in mice and in people are identical. The little animals' immune systems, and probably children's as well, can also react to a memory; "the immune system never forgets." Mice given a sugary liquid mixed with poison will later become sick and die if fed the same liquid without the toxin.

In a similar manner, babies' liver function is affected for two to four weeks after DPT vaccination. If a new food such as cow milk or wheat is introduced during this period, the child's never-forgetting immune system may later react to that food as though it were DPT -- that is, with an allergic or sensitivity reaction, which can cause SIDS-risky ear infections or worse. See also below on risk of potentially SIDS-promoting diabetes.

When vaccines are such a disaster, why do we continue to use them, and to impose ever more of them?

Today we have a system in which vaccine production by the pharmaceutical companies is largely self-regulated. Naturally these companies are interested in profits from their products, which, in itself, is not wrong. However, arbitrary decisions in the mandating of vaccines are made by government bureaucracies, which are highly partisan to the pharmaceutical companies. With no recourse open to parents, we have all the potential ingredients for a tragedy of historical proportions.

The current list of scheduled vaccinations is too long to include in this compact book. Copies are available from local health departments. Children can get as many as thirty-five vaccinations before they start first grade. Two hundred more vaccines are in the pipeline. Scenarios for the future even include consuming vaccines in nose sprays, in ointments, and in fruits and vegetables.

Vaccinations are not based on any science at all. We are vaccinating children in a vacuum of scientific knowledge; no one has ever studied long-term effects. A test would, logically, compare the results over a period of years between a group of people who got a particular vaccine and another group who did not. The FDA requires safety and efficacy tests before approving a new drug. Why are there no long-term studies to assess illness and deaths related to vaccination? And why are there so few studies of what happens in the body at a cellular/molecular level afterward?

Eugene Robinson, MD, Emeritus Professor of Medicine from Stanford Medical School, is a leading authority on risk/benefit analysis in medicine. He authored the definitive book on the subject, Matters of Life and Death: Risks vs. Benefits of Medical Care. In it Dr. Robinson states, "The scientists who develop vaccines should be given great credit and respect for their pioneering work. But it must be recognized that once a promising vaccine is available, that should be the beginning and not the end of the process."

"Accurate assessment of the risk/benefit ratio of the vaccine by means of a controlled clinical trial should be obligatory," concurs Joseph Mercola, DO. "An educational process involving the public should be mandatory, in which the risks and uncertainties are described, as well as the potential benefits."

What you can do to avoid a possible tragic outcome for your baby. Many American doctors refuse inoculations for their own children. In a California survey reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association, more than 90 percent of the obstetrician/gynecologists refused to let their children be vaccinated. "If doctors themselves are afraid of a vaccine, why on earth should the law require that you and other parents allow them to administer it to your kids?", asked pediatrician and author Robert Mendelsohn, MD.

Sidebar on waivers. In all states but two (West Virginia and Mississippi), all parents have the right to decide, shall Johnny and Mary be vaccinated? And if so, when? They can arrange for a waiver even when children are told, "No shots, no school." Waiver can be based on medical or religious grounds; the method and wording are different in each state, and you must know the exact procedure for your state.

Learn the methods of getting your children excused from "immunizations," including hepatitis B "automatically" administered in hospital maternity wards at birth. Obtain this information, state by state, from Dr. Joseph Mercola's "eHealthy News You Can Use" Internet website at www.mercola.com.

Dr. Mercola writes, "To avoid automatic hepatitis B vaccination right after birth, all that is required is to implement the consent waivers listed on my web site." An excellent alternative, of course is -- guided by a trusted, skilled midwife -- to consider giving birth outside a hospital.

The arrangement for waivers is for the protection of the state. If vaccination were required and your child died or got terribly sick, you could sue the state for damages. With a waiver available, in defending against a lawsuit they can reply that you should not have had the child vaccinated if you suspected danger.

If parents do elect to accept vaccines, the timing of administration is critical. Typically, children are lined up for their "immunizations," one after another, no questions asked. But to vaccinate a child who is even slightly sick (for example, sniffling -- and so, vitamin C-devoid), or who reacted badly when sensitized to the same vaccine before, courts disaster. Too many deaths and total losses of lifetime health prove that statement. Afterward, America's vaccine compensation fund, from which only about one claim out of four ever collects a dime, offers cold comfort.

Dr. Lendon Smith offers his counsel: Wise parents will consider forgoing vaccinations, or at least postponing shots until baby is a year old, when SIDS risk drops. "The best advice I can give to parents is to forgo the shots, but make sure that the children in your care have a superior immune system. This requires a sugarless diet without processed foods, an intake of vitamin C of about 1,000 milligrams per day for each year of life up to 5,000 mgs at age five. Plenty of fruits and vegetables are important, plus powdered dried fruits and vegetables picked when ripe and flash frozen. They have the protective anti-oxidants." See Resources.

Homeopathic remedies have been very successful in keeping childhood diseases mild. (Again, see Resources.)

Dr. Smith continues, "If you, as a parent, are unable to ward off the pressure from your doctor, at least give your child some fortifying nutrients the day before, the day of, and the day after the shot: vitamin C, one to two grams; vitamin B6, 100 mgs; and calcium, 1,000 mgs. You are the guardian of your child's health. You have some rights."

In Chapter 7 we look into infantile heart attacks as possible causes of crib death.

Copyright© 2000, Smart Publications

CLICK HERE to view THE INFANT SURVIVAL GUIDE. Protecting Your Baby from the Dangers of Crib Death, Vaccines and Other Environmental Hazards on Amazon.com. If you purchase the book, I receive a small percentage of the sale, which will be used to improve the website.

Inexpensive Home Solution

If you can find 125 micron thickness polyethylene sheeting that is clear it will be safe to use as a mattress cover. Some have found this material at Home Depot. Leave approximately one-half inch by 12 inch opening on undersurface to allow ventilation.

Related Articles:

Victory Over SIDS

Vaccine/SIDS Causal Link

A Simple Explanation for SIDS (Crib Deaths)

Risk of SIDS is 3 Times Greater in Daycare

SIDS - Do Vaccines Play a Role?

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