Juvenile Diabetes
All of the below is from “What Your Doctor May Not Tell You About Children’s Vaccinations
Juvenile diabetes, more commonly known as insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus (IDDM, or type 1 diabetes) is a disease in which the pancreas does not produce the hormone insulin. Insulin is needed by the body to transport sugar (glucose) into the cells, which is necessary for cell metabolism and, indeed, the very life of cells. People cannot live without insulin.
More than one million Americans have IDDM, which typically is diagnosed in childhood or adolescence. According to the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation, thirty-five children per day are diagnosed with the disease. Each of these children can look forward to an average life expectancy that is fifteen years less than people without type 1 diabetes.
Although the exact cause of IDDM is not known, it appears that something causes the body’s immune system to attack the pancreas and destroy the insulin-producing beta cells. Once a person’s beta cells have been destroyed, he or she needs to take injections of insulin every day to survive. In the search for what can trigger this cell destruction, some experts have found evidence that vaccines may play a role.
Diabetes and Vaccines: Evidence Mounts
Reports of a link between viral infections and IDDM have been circulating for more than two hundred years, ever since scientists first reported cases in which children developed IDDM after they had had mumps infection. With the introduction of the mumps vaccines came reports that they , too, appeared to play a role in the development of the disease. In the 1970s and 1980s researchers noted that children were developing IDDM after they received mumps, vaccination, measles-mumps vaccination, and MMR.
However, the mumps vaccine is not the only candidate for causing diabetes. During the early twentieth century, scientists discovered that pertusis vaccine caused diabetes in mice. Then in 1949 there were reports in the medical literature that some children who had received the pertusis vaccine had lowered blood glucose levels, or hypoglycemia. Hypoglycemia is an indication that the body cannot control its insulin level. In 1979 two German researchers lent support to that finding when they found that 59 out of 149 children in their study who had adverse reactions to the pertusis vaccine developed symptoms of hypoglycemia.
Diabetes and Vaccines: Large Studies
Several large studies conducted in the 1990s have provided convincing evidence that vaccines may be associated with the development of IDDM. Here are a few of them.
- In New Zealand in 1996 researchers saw a 60 percent increase in childhood diabetes cases after the country had a mass hepatitis B vaccination campaign from 1988 to 1991 for infants aged six weeks or older.
- Finland has had vaccination programs for decades and J. Barthelow Classen, M.D., a former researcher at the National Institutes of Health, has been documenting a vaccine-diabetes connection there. In Infectious Diseases in Clinical Practice, he reported that the incidence of diabetes in Finland was stable in children younger than four years of age until the government modified its immunization schedule. In 1974 a total of 130,000 children aged three months to four years received Hib or meningitis vaccine. Then in 1976 the government added a second pertussis strain to its pertussis vaccine. Between 1977 and 1979 the incidence of type 1 diabetes increased 64 percent compared with the period 1970 and 1976. Overall, childhood diabetes rates increased 147 percent in children younger than three years after all the vaccine changes were made. The rates increased another 40 percent in the 1980s in children aged five to nine after MMR and Hib vaccines were introduced.
- At the annual meeting of the American Diabetes Association in San Antonio, Texas, on June 13, 2000, researchers 0f a long-term study of hepatitis B vaccine and insulin-dependent diabetes. In 1991 the Italian government had initiated a mandatory hepatitis B immunization program for all children at either age three months or twelve years. Children in other age groups were not vaccinated. In the study, the researchers looked at the incidence of childhood diabetes in both vaccinated and unvaccinated children and found that, overall, those who had received the vaccine were 34 percent more likely to develop diabetes than unvaccinated children. In particular, children who were vaccinated at age twelve were more than two and a half times as likely to be diagnosed with diabetes. Based on these findings, the scientists suggested that the hepatitis B vaccine and when it is given “must be reconsidered to reduce the risk associated with it.”
The Newest Threat: Pneumococcal Vaccine
In November 1999 Dr. Classen testified before the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee and warned that the new pneumococcal (a bacterial disease responsible for a host of ailments ranging in seriousness from ear infections to meningitis — see chapter 12 for more information) vaccine, called PCV7, would likely cause a large increase in the number of IDDM cases. The new vaccine is similar in structure to the Haemophilus (Hib) vaccine, which has been linked to increases in IDDM. Because the pneumococcal vaccine contains seven different vaccines, Dr. Classen beleives that it may be seven times more reactive than the Hib vaccine.
To support his claims, Dr. Classen explained the results of his recently published ten-year study in the British Medical Journal in which children injected with Hib vaccine were compared with unvaccinated children. After seven years the rate of diabetes was elevated 26 percent among vaccinated children compared with unvaccinated children. The bottom line is that there were fifty-eight more cases of IDDM per 100,000 immunized children compared with nonimmunized children.
Based on these results, and considering the larger populations in the United States compared with Finland, Dr. Classen believes the Hib vaccine could be expected to cause four thousand cases of IDDM a year in the United States. Because the pneumococcal vaccine contain seven vaccines, he projected that it could cause 28,000 cases of IDDM in the United States each year.
Dr. Classen asked the FDA to delay approval of the vaccine until it could be given without the chance of it causing diabetes, but the FDA did not concur with his request. For now, the passage of time will tell whether Dr. Classen’s predictions regarding pneumococcal vaccine and diabetes are valid.
