A beautiful little girl was perfectly healthy until 3 days following her DPT injection when she developed a high fever, screaming, and convulsions. After the episode subsided, this little girl was left with permanent brain damage. Television specials featuring the tragic story of a child with severe neurologic damage following a DPT injection are a vivid warning to take new medical technologies seriously. However, these isolated tragedies are only part of the picture.

Throughout human history, infectious diseases have plagued the population year after year, causing measureless misery and death. This rampage had been virtually unchecked until the twentieth century. During the second half of this century, a new process called immunization was introduced on a wide scale. This led to the global eradication of smallpox, the elimination of poliomyelitis from the Americas, and has almost eliminated tetanus, diphtheria, mumps, and the horrible congenital rubella syndrome. Immunization has greatly reduced the incidence of measles, pertussis, and meningitis. Millions of deaths and other tragedies have been prevented.

While not perfect, immunizations have been a wild success!!!

Our bodies are designed with an intricate immune system to protect us from diseases. When possible, it is far better to work with the body's immune system, rather than to intervene with invasive procedures and toxic agents after a serious disease has already been contracted. The immune system has the amazing ability to learn.– When someone is exposed to an illness and is not killed by it, the body actually learns from the experience. The next time it is exposed to the same illness, the body often recognizes the culprit and sets out to destroy it.

The concept behind immunization is to expose children to a very small, very safe bit of the most dangerous diseases that they are likely to encounter at some point in their lives. This mild exposure helps their immune systems learn to recognize these entities, so that if they are exposed to the full-blown diseases later in life, they will either not become infected or have much less serious infections. This is a preventive, natural way to deal with infectious diseases.

DPT is designed to immunize against diphtheria, pertussis, and tetanus.

Diphtheria is a very serious bacterial disease that can make a person unable to breathe, cause paralysis, or even heart failure. About 10% of the people who get diphtheria die from it. Before the DPT shot was introduced, 17,000 children died in a single year in the United States alone in a diphtheria epidemic. Over the last several years, only a very few cases of diphtheria have been reported in the United States. In 1988 there were zero cases. This is primarily because most children have had shots to protect them. Diphtheria isn't gone, but most children are ready for it if they are exposed.

Pertussis, more commonly known as whooping cough, is extremely contagious. Before widespread immunization, virtually all children contracted whooping cough. Small children get the sickest; adults may appear only to have a bad cold. In the United States in recent years, about 4,200 cases of pertussis have been officially reported.Nevertheless, pertussis is a common cause of undiagnosed chronic cough in adults and older children. A study published in the June 15, 2001 issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases found that pertussis was the cause of chronic cough in 19.9% of the patients studied.

For healthy teens and adults, pertussis is usually nothing more than a long nuisance (lasting months, sometimes with vomiting).

For babies and those at high risk, pertussis can be severe or even life threatening. It causes repeated spells of coughing that can make it difficult to eat, drink, or breathe. About 1 out of every 200 children who get pertussis will die of it. Another 1 out of every 200 will have lifetime brain damage. As many as 2% will have seizures, 16% will get pneumonia, and 50% (even in this modern era of reduced hospitalization) will be sick enough to be hospitalized.

Tetanus, also called lockjaw, is caused by a bacterium that is common in the soil. When this germ gets into an open cut or wound, an unprotected person can contract tetanus, which creates serious muscle spasms that can be strong enough to snap the spine. Even with modern medical care, about 30% of the people who get tetanus die from the disease. Tetanus was once very widespread, but since 1975 only 50 to 100 cases have been reported each year in the United States.

While the DPT vaccine has dramatically cut down on the risks of disease and death for our children, exposing them to even a very small amount of these serious infections can cause side effects. Many children will have soreness, redness, and swelling at the injection site. Many will also have a fever, be fussy, drowsy, and have a decreased appetite for one to two days after the vaccination. Giving acetaminophen every four hours for 24 hours following the immunization makes these mild side effects much less common.

Moderate reactions to the DPT vaccine occur in 0.1% to 1.0% of children and include ongoing crying (for three hours or more), a high fever (up to 105 degrees F), and an unusual, high-pitched crying. About 0.057% of children will have a febrile seizure or a period of shock-collapse, where they become pale and limp for a short period. While these side effects are certainly disturbing, all of the above problems are temporary and have never been demonstrated to create a long-term problem of any kind.

Moreover, it stands to reason that those children who react strongly to the little bit of material in the DPT would be those same children likely to be most affected if they encountered the diseases themselves.

Severe problems from the DPT immunization happen very rarely. These include a serious allergic reaction, a prolonged seizure, a decrease in consciousness, lasting brain disease, or even death. These severe neurologic events occur after approximately 1 in 140,000 doses of the DPT vaccine (0.0007%). This number is approximately the same as the number of acute neurologic illnesses that happen in children over a similar time period, not associated with the vaccine. Five major epidemiological studies looking at neurologic risks related to immunization have been unable to demonstrate a causal relationship between DPT and any severe, chronic neurologic disorder. Although the possibility of a relationship cannot be discounted, it must certainly be very rare.

Putting these risks into perspective, even if you assume the worst-case scenario (1 in 140,000), compared to all other preventive and natural health measures, DPT is very safe. DPT is safer than exercise. A healthy person is more likely to be injured, disabled, or killed by complications associated with exercise than by those that may be associated with the DPT (again, assuming the worst-case risk numbers for DPT). A presumably healthy adult who jogs two hours a week for a year is 15 times more likely to die from jogging than a child would be from getting a DPT shot.

Most of the reactions to DPT injection are thought to be from the pertussis component. A safer acellular pertussis vaccine has been developed in Japan. In 1991, it was licensed for use in the United States. The old pertussis vaccine is made from dead whole pertussis cells and is mixed with the diphtheria and tetanus vaccines to make the regular DPT shot. The new acellular pertussis vaccine is made of only a few parts of the pertussis cell and is also combined with the diphtheria and tetanus. There are now several FDA approved vaccines containing accellular pertussis (DTaP). Because of its better safety profile, DTaP is recommended over the regular DPT vaccine for children in the United States.

For most individuals, the benefits of the DPT vaccine far outweigh the risks. The following events or conditions may have an impact on the risk of a reaction with the DPT vaccine:

• Serious reaction to a previous injection of DPT
• Moderate or severe illness
• History of seizure(s)
• Parent or sibling with seizures
• Brain problem that is getting worse

If your child has any of these conditions, discuss the risks and benefits of the DPT vaccine with your physician before proceeding.

Immunizations are a way for us as a community of humans to stand together for our health. Not only does the DPT vaccination help each individual child who receives it, but it helps all of us -- the risks drop dramatically for each of us the higher the percentage of the population that is immunized.

While watching the movie Independence Day, I was thrilled to see people from warring factions joining together for a common goal. Immunizations are an opportunity that we have each day to do the same thing. When many people are vaccinated, everyone benefits, because the chance for the spread of disease is greatly reduced. The children most likely to die from pertussis are those who are too young to get the DPT vaccination. The best way to protect them is for all of us to be immunized, thus stopping the spread of this potentially deadly disease.