Immunizations....what has happened

Hi. My name is Paul Offit. I am talking to you today from the Vaccination Education Center at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. I would like to talk about a report from the Institute of Medicine (IOM), published on January 16, 2013, looking at the safety of vaccines and the vaccine schedule. The IOM tried to answer the questions, "Is this vaccine schedule, as recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Academy of Pediatrics, reasonable? Has it been well tested? Is it safe?"

The advantage of the IOM is that they are part of the National Academies, which don't receive funding from pharmaceutical companies or the federal government. This panel, for the most part, is made up of individuals who have never done research specifically in vaccines. They haven't done clinical studies on vaccines, reviewed biological license applications, or participated on data and safety monitoring boards for vaccine research. This is a group that has expertise in other areas of medicine, and they brought that expertise to looking at the safety of vaccines.

Information from IndustryThey looked at voluminous amounts of data, including data from so-called "concomitant use studies," in which investigators aim to prove that a vaccine, when it is added to the schedule, doesn't interfere with the safety or immunogenicity profiles of existing vaccines, and vice-versa. Hundreds of such studies have been conducted, and anyone who looks at these data closely will come to the same conclusions that the IOM came to, which is that the vaccine schedule is well-tested and safe.

Hopefully, for some patients in your practice, this review by a group of independent investigators will be convincing. I suspect that some patients, no matter what the data show, will still choose not to get vaccines. This is unfortunate because then we simply have to keep our fingers crossed and hope that children don't suffer as a result of that choice, whereas we wouldn't have to keep our fingers crossed and depend on luck if people simply got vaccines. I hope the IOM study will help.

Thank you for your attention.

And as far as immunizations and the prolific use of antibiotics,, weve created these newer strains of ever developing and morphing bacterias. Have we not?

Howrah District, India (CNN) -- Rukhsar Khatoon is too young to fully grasp the significance of her life: that she is a last in a country of 1.2 billion people.
She has become the greatest symbol of India's valiant -- and successful -- effort to rid itself of a crippling and potentially deadly disease. Rukhsar, 4, is the final documented case of polio in India.

Her parents, Abdul Shah, 32, and Shobejan Begum, 30, blame themselves for their child's suffering. They had their other children vaccinated, but not Rukhsar. She was a sickly child, in and out of hospital with liver infections and diarrhea. They thought it safer not to subject her to more medication.

Rukhsar's father Abdul Shah blames himself and says he thought she would never walk again.

It wasn't until little Rukhsar's right foot swelled and twisted in early 2011 that her parents took her to a hospital in nearby Beleghata for tests. She was just 18 months old when doctors confirmed the worst: Rukhsar had polio.

Polio is caused by a virus that attacks the brain and spinal cord cells that move joints and muscles. About one-third of those who contract polio in India are left paralyzed -- as was Rukhsar.

"There were three keys to our success," Kapur says. "Immunize, immunize and immunize."