CDC TELEBRIEFING-TODAY VACCINES 1-29-15

CDC TELEBRIEFING:

MEASLES IN THE UNITED STATES, 2015

January 29, 2015 3:30 pm PST

Dawn Winkler hapi.vaxinfo@gmail.com

I just sat through a very painful telebriefing on measles put on by the CDC. Leading this event was Anne Schuchat, M.D. (RADM, USPHS) Assistant Surgeon General, United States Public Health Service; Director, CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.

Pronounced “Shookit”.

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I called in promptly just before 3:30 pm PST and was asked my name and then allowed to listen in. Dr. Schuchat was introduced by a Benjamin Haines, Hanes, Hays, (sp, not sure).

Dr. Shuchat made some opening remarks that included the following:

·         The current measles outbreak is concerning because we’ve already had as many cases in January of 2015 as we have had in an entire year in many cases
·         The US has had 84 cases, spanning 14 states and 67 of those have been since December 28, 2014 and are connected to Disneyland
·         Measles was declared “eliminated” in the US in 2000 (there were 86 cases that year, so in a year that there were 86 cases, measles was declared eliminated but now that we have 84 cases in the first month of 2015, it is problematic and concerning)
·         She was very adamant that this outbreak is NOT the result of vaccine failure but failed to provide ANY statistics on the vaccination status of those involved in the outbreak
·         She stated that the MAJORITY of cases in this outbreak are in those who are not vaccinated, but again, failed to give ANY statistics
·         Everyone should get an MMR no matter what, even if they are older and may have had the disease (later on in the call she admits that those over 50 likely have had measles and therefore are immune)
·         The MMR vaccine is extremely safe and effective
·         Vaccine coverage is high which increases the chances of having cases in some vaccinated people
·         This outbreak is “consistent with a highly effective vaccine”
·         1 in 12 children are not getting their first MMR vaccine on time
·         12 months is not too early to get an MMR vaccine, parents should not be afraid to do so
·         We are seeing more cases in adults this time than usual

 

 

Other items that came up in her responses to questions were:

 

·         15% of those in the outbreak have been hospitalized
·         The genotype that caused the Disney outbreak is causing outbreaks in 14 other countries right now.
·         She stated that in 2013, 79% of cases were in unvaccinated individuals (there were 179 cases)
·         At some point she said that 1 in 3 die. She HAD to be talking about the third world but I missed some of the conversation and would need to either listen to it again or see the transcripts.
·         The median age for measles infection is increasing

I promptly pressed *1 as instructed to be allowed to ask a question. I did this twice. I waited patiently. I was never allowed to ask a question. Those allowed to ask questions were:

Ana ? from Bloomberg News

Maggie Fox – NBC?

Eric German – uncertain of media relationship

Mike S – Associated Press

Dan Childs – ABC

Rosanna Shaw (sp?) – LA Times

Betsy McKay – Wall Street Journal

Matthew Zucker, Stucker (sp?) – CNN

Jody Tillman – Tampa Bay Times

Lenny Bernstein – Washington Post

Mike S from the Associated Press was the only one to ask what percentage of cases were in vaccinated individuals. Mr. Bernstien was the only one to ask what percentage of those who contracted measles during this outbreak have personal beliefs exemptions. However, NO ONE asked for the statistics about how many cases are in fully vaccinated individuals, partially vaccinated individuals, and unvaccinated individuals. Dr. Shuchat did not answer either Mike S or Mr. Berstein’s questions. Betsy McKay from WSJ did say she thought that at least 13% of the cases are in vaccinated individuals but Dr. Schuchat could not confirm or elaborate on that.

Most other questions asked were so boring and unimportant I had trouble staying awake. It was hard for me to believe that the people asking them are journalists. Many seemed concerned with where the fourteen cases not associated with Disneyland came from. A few seemed very concerned with the fact that exemptions exist and Dan Childs from ABC flat out asked if non medical exemptions should even be allowed. Dr. Schuchat made it a point to say that medical exemptions are essential, especially for children with leukemia and other cancers, but didn’t answer his question about whether or not personal beliefs and religious exemptions should be allowed.

These are the questions that I would have asked had I been allowed:

·         How many of the 84 cases are in people who are fully vaccinated? Partially vaccinated? Not vaccinated? You can’t just say “most” are in unvaccinated people. What constitutes most?
·         Have all 84 cases been laboratory confirmed?
·         What is the genotype for those laboratory confirmed? Wild type measles or vaccine strain?
·         Why aren’t recently vaccinated children who are shedding measles virus kept home until they are no longer shedding?
·         How many deaths from measles have occured in the United States in the past decade?
·         There were 644 cases of measles in the US in 2014 (432 depending on the source). Why is an outbreak of 84 cases, 67 associated with Disneyland, so alarming and concerning?
·         Why aren’t the numbers in the MMWR consistent with what the media and you, Dr. Schuchat, reporting? Currently it shows 3 cases for 2015.
·         How can you say you are certain that this outbreak has nothing to do with vaccine failure and at the same time either not know or not give the statistical breakdown on how many cases are in vaccinated individuals?
·         If vaccine coverage rates are high, as you said they are, then why is everyone pointing at those who don’t vaccinate?
·         If the MMR vaccine is highly effective, then why did you state that this outbreak is consistent for a highly effective vaccine and that it should be expected to see some cases in vaccinated people? And again, how many of those infected have been fully vaccinated?
·         In light of William Thompson’s findings and admissions, why wouldn’t parents be afraid to give their child MMR vaccine at 12 months? The covered up increased risk had everything to do with the timing of that particular dose of that particular vaccine.

Had there been any real journalist on this conference call, perhaps some of these questions would have been asked.

Overall, there seemed to be a focus on that everyone needs to be vaccinated, the vaccine is great, the vaccine is perfectly safe and super effective and that parents need to be educated on this disease because it CAN be serious. Statistics were almost absent from the entire conversation and when pressed for any, Dr. Schuchat just said they don’t have that information right now. There was also a very clear undertone about exemptions being problematic, despite any statistics or evidence being given to support that concern. Dr. Schuchat was overly emphatic that everyone needs to go get MMR vaccines right now, regardless of age or prior disease history. “It doesn’t hurt anything to just get the vaccine”.

They gave a main media hotline at the end for questions 404-639-3286 and said that transcripts of this conference call will be available at www.cdc.gov/media The call was also recorded but they said nothing about that being made available.

 

ALERT-TimeSensitive

Please forward far and wide --

From Dawn Richardson, Director of Advocacy, National Vaccine Information Center:

Congrats to MS State Director Mary Jo for her piece published by USA Today. If you have a facebook account, please post it and encourage people to vote in the poll supporting our position.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2015/01/27/vaccines-mississippi-parents-for-vaccine-rights-editorials-debates/22435889/

Also make sure to tell people to vote on the forced vax editorial too.  Only 9% strongly agree and 11% strongly disagree.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2015/01/27/measles-vaccine-disneyland-herd-immunity-editorials-debates/22435357/

Please read the voting instruction carefully. 

ALERT-HPV vaccines 34 deaths in one month

 HPV vaccines: 34 deaths reported in one month?

By Norma Erickson

Death reports after HPV vaccines have been filed at a rate of less than five per month since Gardasil and Cervarix were approved for use in the United States in 2006/07. The SaneVax team was shocked when the latest available update from the VAERS (vaccine adverse event reporting system) database revealed 34 death reports after HPV vaccines in a single month. 

You can pretty much bet that any anomaly of this magnitude bears investigation.  The SaneVax team decided to run a search for only the deaths reported after administration of HPV vaccines within the last month. 35 death reports show up (We assume one was prior to the close of the previous month’s stats). The other 34 are identical reports from “a nurse via a company sales representative.” 

To run the same search, go to www.medalerts.org and choose the HPV vaccines (HPV2, HPV4 and HPVX), death and a lower appeared on VAERS date of Oct 2014 – to run the same search our team did. You might want to take a look and see what you think.

Several questions come immediately to mind, such as:

• Is Merck trying to muddy the VAERS water even more by stacking the death count? 
• If so, why did they not include all 72 reports referred to in the 35 that were submitted to VAERS? 
• Why are the reports submitted by a sales rep instead of the nurse who was referred to in all of the reports? 
• Why does each report have a different submission date?
• The reports refer to a physician reporting at a vaccine conference “72 deaths after Gardasil administration via embolism/thrombosis events,” could this possibly be a legitimate report? 
• Perhaps the FDA/CDC included all of these reports in a single month hoping someone like us would simply report the numbers and thereby be open to being discredited/ridiculed? 
• Will the other 37 reports show up next month – or at a later date? 

Whatever the answers to the questions above end up being, VAERS reports are what they are – despite the limitations of the system. SaneVax has built our reputation on reporting from only scientific, medical, or government documents so we will continue to report the statistics in VAERS as they are updated by health officials from the United States government.

The SaneVax team would strongly suggest viewing this particular increase in death reports after HPV vaccine administration with much caution. Feel free to raise questions of your own – investigate for yourself.

The updated VAERS reports for HPV vaccines through November 2014 can be viewed here. 

Any questions? Ask the FDA or the CDC!

Or, better yet – ask your congressional representatives and senators why there are no penalties for failure to comply with the ‘mandatory’ reporting of suspected adverse events (possible side-effects) after vaccine administration as required under the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act!

Source:http://sanevax.org/hpv-vaccines-34-deaths-reported-one-month/

BREAST MILK IMMUNIZATION

Human milk has a microbiome - and the bacteria are protecting mothers and infants!

The human microbiome project was a major undertaking by the National Institutes of Health, with a fairly simple mission: understand the bacterial communities living in and on the human body, and the potential impact these communities may have on health. Hundreds of individuals donated everything from feces to nasal secretions. However, one key system was ignored - human milk. That’s right – the microbiome of human milk was not studied.

Probably some of this had to do with a long standing myth that human milk was sterile. Why study something without bacteria, right? But, as we have quickly learned – human milk is far from sterile. The average baby consuming 800 mL/27 ounces of human milk will received between 100,000 and 10,000,000 million bacteria from human milk per day (Fernandez et al., 2013).

Fortunately, research into the human milk microbiome has continued despite this oversight by the Human Microbiome Project. It appears that nine “operational taxonomic units” (generally closely related species based on DNA analysis of the bacteria) are extremely common in most mothers studied to date: Streptococcus, Corynebacteria, Bradyrhizobiaceae, Staphylococcus, Serratia, Ralstonia, Propionibacterium, Pseudomonas, and Sphingomonas. These nine groups typically account for more than 50% of total bacteria. Bififobacterium and Lactobacillus are also common, but less universal (Fernandez et al., 2013).

The microbiota of milk appears to be quite stable (Fernandez et al., 2013), although a few factors appear to shape the composition. First, mothers with higher BMIs (in the obese range) produce colostrum with more Lactobacillus, and mature milk with more Staphylococcus and less Bifidobacterium (Cabera-Rubio et al., 2012). Cabera-Rubio and colleagues (2012) also found that greater pregnancy weight gain predicted more Staphylococcus in the milk in a small study of 18 mothers, half obese and half of normal weight. 

But here is the really neat part – guess what else altered the milk microbiota? Type of delivery. Mothers who had caesarian sections had a different milk microbiota than mothers who had a vaginal delivery. And the variation continued – mothers undergoing emergency caesarians after laboring had milk microbiotas closer to those of women who delivered vaginally than women with elective caesarians.

Where do the bacteria come from? Initially, it was thought that the milk microbiome was really just contamination from the skin microbiome. However, this is WRONG, WRONG, WRONG. While the milk microbiome does contain some of the same families of bacteria as skin, multi-site sampling of mammary skin and milk revealed that these are not the same species and/or genera. Instead, it appears that the microbiome of milk comes from several places, including the maternal gut microflora. Current evidence supports dendritic cells as the likely transfer mechanism. These cells, along with some macrophages, can open the tight junctions between cells forming the gut barrier and take in living bacteria. These cells can then maintain the live bacteria for several days in mesenteric lymph nodes scattered throughout the body (Fernandez et al., 2013). Dendritic cells are also pretty picky about what they take up – dead bacteria or latex beads will not activate immature dendritic cells for bacteria uptake, while commensal species, like Lactobacillus, show high levels of binding (Rescigno et al., 2001).

Figure 2: Dendritic cell (shown in blue). Image from http://www.cell.com/pictureshow/immunology

This allows for oral manipulation of the milk microbiome – mothers given supplemental Lactobacillus from three strands, L. gasseri, L. fermentum, L. salivarius, showed transfer of these strands to the milk (Jimenez et al., 2008). 

This lead to the logical question – could these strands be used to treat mastitis? Arroyo et al., (2010) randomized 352 women with mastitis to three groups – one dosed with L. fermentum, one dosed with L. salivarius, and one given standard antibiotic treatment (4 different drugs were used). Bacterial counts for milk were obtained for all mothers on Day 0 – that is before treatment started. All mothers had bacterial counts of 4.35-4.47 log10 CFU (colony forming units) – a little less than double the recommended bacterial counts for milk of 2.5 log10 CFUs. Mothers received 21 days of treatment, and milk bacterial counts were repeated on day 21. Women who received L. fermentum had mean bacterial counts of 2.61 log10 CFUs; L. salivarius had bacterial counts 2.33 log10 CFUs with clinical relief of mastitis, and all reported reductions in reported breast pain. Mothers who received antibiotics did not fare as well. Mean bacterial count for antibiotic receiving mothers was 3.28 log10 CFUs and pain scores were much higher. Three months later, only 8.8% of mothers receiving either L. fermentum or L. salivarius had experienced recurrent mastitis, while 30.1% of mothers receiving antibiotics had. All differences between antibiotic and probiotic groups were significantly different – the kind of significant difference that makes researchers do their happy dance.

So the milk microbiome appears to be protecting mothers – but there is also good evidence that it is protecting infants. Little is known about the salivary microbiome of infants, but based on preliminary evidence, it appears to, not surprisingly, have some overlap with the milk microbiome (Nasidze et al., 2009). The milk microbiome also appears to contribute to the microbiome of the infant GI tract, as well as the development of immune function in the infant (Fernandez et al., 2013). Infants supplemented with Lactobacillus fermentum (yes, the same as used for the treatment of mastitis) showed significant reductions in diarrheal and respiratory infections in early infancy compared to control infants (Maldonado et al., 2012). Many of the bacteria in the milk microbiome are protecting both the mother and the infant from infection, and may even be involved in the development of immune tolerance.

Milk remains amazing – even the bacteria in milk!

References

Arroyo R, Martín V, Maldonado A, Jiménez E, Fernández L, Rodríguez JM. (2010) Treatment of infectious mastitis during lactation: antibiotics versus oral administration of lactobacilli isolated from breast milk. Clinical Infectious Diseases 50:1551–8.

Cabrera-Rubio R1, Collado MC, Laitinen K, Salminen S, Isolauri E, Mira A. (2012) The human milk microbiome changes over lactation and is shaped by maternal weight and mode of delivery. Am J Clin Nutr. 96(3):544-51.

Fernández L1, Langa S, Martín V, Maldonado A, Jiménez E, Martín R, Rodríguez JM. (2013) The human milk microbiota: origin and potential roles in health and disease. Pharmacol Research 69(1):1-10.

Jiménez E, Fernández L, Maldonado A, Martín R, Olivares M, Xaus J, et al. (2008) Oral administration of lactobacilli strains isolated from breast milk as an alternative for the treatment of infectious mastitis during lactation. Applied and Environment Microbiology 74:4650–5.

Maldonado J, Ca˜nabate F, Sempere L, Vela F, Sánchez AR, Narbona E, et al. (2012) Human milk probiotic Lactobacillus fermentum CECT5716 reduces the incidence of gastrointestinal and upper respiratory tract infections in infants. Journal of Pediatric Gastroenterology and Nutrition 54:55–61.

Martín R, Olivares M, Marín ML, Fernández L, Xaus J, Rodríguez JM. (2005) Probiotic potential of 3 lactobacilli strains isolated from breast milk. Journal of Human Lactation 21:8–17.

Nasidze I, Li J, Quinque D, Tang K, Stoneking M. (2009) Global diversity in the human salivary microbiome. Genome Research 19:636–43.

 

Rescigno M, Urbano M, Valzasina B, Francolín M, Rotta G, Bonasio R, et al. (2001) Dendritic cells express tight junction proteins and penetrate gut epithelial monolayers to sample bacteria. Nature Immunology 2:361–7.

SOURCE: http://biomarkersandmilk.blogspot.dk/2014/12/human-milk-has-microbiome-and-bacteria.html