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M. Spencer Green / AP
A new study adds to a growing body of evidence that the flu shot is safe for pregnant women.
NEW YORK — Adding to evidence that the flu shot is safe for pregnant women, a new study finds no link between the vaccine and the risk of serious birth defects.
The study, of nearly 9,000 pregnant women who got the flu shot, found that about 2 percent had a baby with a major birth defect, such as a malformation in the heart or a cleft lip.
That was identical to the rate among almost 77,000 pregnant women who did not get the vaccine.
What's more, researchers found, women who got vaccinated were less likely to suffer a stillbirth (a pregnancy loss after the 20th week): 0.3 percent did, versus 0.6 percent of unvaccinated women.
Their newborns also had a lower death rate: 0.2 percent died soon after birth, compared with 0.4 percent of babies born to unvaccinated moms.
It's not clear if the flu vaccine deserves the credit. But Dr. Jeanne S. Sheffield, the lead researcher on the work, said it's possible the vaccine helped by preventing severe cases of the flu.
"Can we say for sure that it's the vaccine? No," said Sheffield, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas.
But, she added, these findings suggest that the flu shot is at least safe, and possibly has a benefit against stillbirth.
Sheffield and her colleagues report the findings in the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other groups recommend that all pregnant women get a seasonal flu shot.
That's because pregnant women are more likely than other women their age to get a severe case of the flu or have complications, such as pneumonia. The flu is also thought to raise the risk of preterm delivery and fetal distress.
Still, Sheffield said, many women and doctors alike still have concerns about flu vaccine safety during pregnancy — especially the first trimester, which is when birth defects form and when most miscarriages happen.
But in this study, the researchers found that vaccination during the first trimester came with no increased risk of birth defects.
Despite recommendations to get the flu shot, most pregnant women do not. In the U.S., only between 10 percent and one-quarter of women have been vaccinated each flu season over the last couple decades, Sheffield's team notes.
Based on studies, that seems largely due to safety worries.
On the other hand, Sheffield said "it's amazing" how many women are unaware that the flu itself is considered a risk during pregnancy.
"The flu is a problem in pregnancy," she said. "But we have a vaccine to prevent it. And it's considered safe and effective in any trimester."
A CDC study published last year found "no unusual patterns" of pregnancy complications or newborn health problems among U.S. women who received the flu shot between 1990 and 2009.
Based on cases reported to the CDC's Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, the rate of miscarriage was 1.9 per one million vaccinated pregnant women.
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Leave a Comment:
sure it is.
Got evidence to the contrary? Any?
Did they take the thimerasol out?
Of course Big Pharma wants us to believe vaccines are safe for pregnant women. If they can frighten everyone into believing they will die without a flu shot Big Pharma makes even more billions of dollars.
I got a flu shot while pregnant. I told them I was pregnant and they gave me the preservative-free shot. All people have to do is ask for it.
So did you get the flu yet?
Now for the Ingredients:
Flu shots have THIMEROSOL in them, a mercury-based preservative! In infants under 6 months, this turns into inorganic mercury and deposits in the brain permanently. Think about what it's doing to the fetus. Other toxic ingredients include Aluminum, Antibiotics, Ethylene Glycol, Formaldehyde and Phenol.
Flu shot facts - effectiveness
Most people simply assume that vaccination is effective. And since flu shots are a form of vaccination, they take for granted that flu shots are also effective. This basic assumption needs to be closely examined.
If you carefully examine historical health records, you will see that the death rate from various infectious diseases, such as measles, diptheria, smallpox, etc. fell sharply before the introduction of vaccination, not after.
Why? Because of improvements in sanitation and general hygiene, not because vaccination, antibiotics and other forms of medical intervention had been effective.
You also have to understand the nature of vaccination and flu shots. Bacteria and viruses come in many forms known as different strains. And vaccines can be designed only to work with certain strains. Currently available flu shots - if and when they work - can only work against common strains of the flu virus that have been around for a long, the so-called "common flu" or "seasonal flu".
Flu shot facts - useless against new strains
One of the most important flu shot facts to know is this - flu shots are totally ineffective against new strains of flu.And they are effective against only some - not all - existing flu strains. Health authorities and flu vaccine manufacturers do their best to predict which strains are most likely to hit in a particular year and they package the flu vaccines accordingly.
At best, they can cover about 70 percent of common flu viruses. But sometimes, they can be way off the mark. In 2004, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that the year’s flu vaccine had "no or low effectiveness" against influenza or influenza-like illness. Depending on how the data were analyzed, the vaccine protected from zero percent to 14 percent of study participants.
Flu shot facts - why they don't always work
Even when the correct flu vaccine has been administrated, there are still reasons why it may not work:
Flu shot facts - scientific studies
Medical scientists - the very people who promote flu shots and other forms of vaccination - have themselves reported that most flu shots simply do not work. Some recent scientific findings include:
Flu shot facts - effectiveness exaggerated
The debate about the effectiveness of flu shots had been on-going for some time. And this debate was re-ignited in 2008 with the publication of studies which suggest that their effectiveness had been exaggerated.
Dr Michael L. Jackson and colleagues at the Group Health Center for Health Studies in Seattle, reported in The Lancet that elderly people who were healthy and conscientious about staying well were the most likely to get an annual flu shot. Those who are weak and frail are less likely to get to their doctor’s office or a clinic to receive the vaccine.
Similar findings were also reported by Dr Lisa Jackson and colleagues at Group Health Co-operative, Seattle, who studied 73,527 people aged 65 and over during an eight year period.
Both these studies note that part of the claimed "effectiveness" of flu shots was due to the fact the the people taking them were already healthier in the first place. After adjusting for this bias, the actual effectiveness rate is much lower.
Flu vaccine side effects
Flu vaccine side effects are seldom considered by the majority of people who wish to protect themselves against the flu.
They simply assume that vaccination is both effective and safe. That's what they have been told by doctors and that is what they accept without questioning.
All these assumptions are WRONG. Vaccination does not offer effective protection against the flu. And we shall discuss the effectiveness of flu vaccines in another article. For now, we shall look at flu vaccine side effects.
Far from being safe, some of the flu shot side effects are very serious, including death. For children, vaccination has also been strongly linked with increased incidences of autism.
The basic problem with vaccination is that it is based on the wrong idea that bacteria and viruses "cause" disease.
But, as we see in the article about the germ theory of disease, this is a faulty idea to begin with. Based on this idea, doctors expose people to small doses of weakened bacteria or viruses, in the belief that it would stimulate their immune response against disease.
But vaccines don't just contain the weakened bactria or virus. They also cotain a lot of very highly toxic chemicals, including mercury, aluminium and formaldehyde. These partly account for flu vaccine side effects - and the dangers of vaccination in general. At the same time, the weakened bacteria or virus presents its own set of dangers too.
Harm of vaccination
Before we look specifically at flu vaccine side effects, we consider the dangers of vaccination in general. And the first thing to note is that vaccination has not stopped people from “catching” the very diseases that they have been vaccinated against. Despite vaccination, many diseases are again on the rise:
In a February 1995 article, The Lancet discusses the harm of vaccination in an article, Measles and pertussis in developing countries with good vaccine coverage. The article reported that among those who have been vaccinated, these diseases often return in a more virulent form. Unfortunately, rather than re-think vaccination, the article went to on recommend more vaccination, at an earlier age.
Childhood diseases like measles and pertussis, or whooping cough, are actually the body’s way of throwing off inherited impurities. They are often harmless. A study of 500 pertussis cases, published in early 1995 in the British Medical Journal, found that most cases were mild. Only 5 cases developed pneumonia. Of these, 3 had been vaccinated.
Because childhood illnesses are a means of discharge, suppressing them through vaccination often leads to more serious, long-term illnesses. Thus, the harm of vaccination lies not only in its side efects, but also in its role in suppressing natural -- and necessary -- body processes:
By suppressing diseases during childhood, these same diseases may occur in adult life, where there is higher risk of complications. Less than 5 percent of children under 3 years infected with hepatitis A become jaundiced. In contrast, 75 percent of infected adolescents and adults develop acute symptoms. By allowing childhood diseases to run their natural course, children develop long-term immunity without harm to the body’s immune system.
Human degeneration
The harm of vaccination was recognised as far back as 1884. At that time, J Compton Burnett, an English homeopath, wrote: The vaccinated person is poisoned by the vaccine virus…
Burnett notes that vaccination is successful only when a person reacts to the virus. If not, the virus gets absorbed. And this leads to what he called “chronic vaccinosis” -- a chronic form of the very same disease that the person was supposed to have been vaccinated against.
Early in the 20th century, American homeopath J H Allen warned that with vaccination, “the whole race will soon become degenerated.”
One vocal critic of vaccination is Dr R Obomsawin, describes it as “a futile dream”.
Dr Obomsawin was originally commissioned by the Canadian International Development Agency to write about the benefits of vaccination. But after his research, he wrote instead about the harm of vaccination. Dr Obomsawin even questioned the ethics of it: Vaccination inevitably weakens the immunologic system of the child, leaving this system crippled in its ability to protect the child throughout life.
By weakening the immune system, vaccination contributes to auto-immune and degenerative diseases and allergic reactions. In his book, Vaccination, Social Violence and Criminality, medical historian H L Coulter draws links between vaccination and autism, minimal brain damage, anti-social behaviour and violent crime. The link betweenautism and vaccinations has today become one of the most serious challenges to the safety of vaccination.
Why are vaccines so harmful?
When we look at why are vaccines so harmful, we can better understand some of the flu vaccine side effects.
One reason is that in order to produce vaccines, the bacteria and viruses are cultivated in animal proteins, such as rabbit brain tissue, monkey kidney tissue, pig blood, etc. When injected into the body, these proteins turn toxic because proteins have to be broken down into amino acids by the digestive system before they can be utilised.
Another problem is that the child’s immune system is not fully developed until about the age of 4. The child’s undeveloped immune system may not be able to distinguish between its own protein and foreign proteins. This can lead to auto-immune diseases, where the body’s immune system attacks its own cells.
Foreign proteins also contain animal genetic information which may be picked up by the vaccine and implanted into human genes. This can result in genetic damage.
Combining several vaccines can result in strange new viruses that cause strange new diseases. George Vithoulkas, a world-renowned homeopath, states: Instead of protecting people through vaccination, we are making humanity sick on a chronic level.
Mild flu vaccine side effects
We now take a closer look at some of the more specific, possible flu vaccine side effects.
MILD flu vaccine side effects are common and these are acknowledged by government health authorities such as the US Center for Disease Control (CDC). These flu vaccine side effects include:
At the same time, the CDC acknowledges that on rare occasions, flu vaccination can cause serious problems, such as severe allergic reactions. And the US government has established a National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) for those who believe they have been injured by vaccination.
Nasal flu vaccines
Besides flu shots, nasal-spray vaccines, called FluMist® are have been available since its approval by the US FDA in June 2003. And one of the first things to note is that this vaccine was initially not approved in 2001 because of safety concerns.
The flu vaccine side effects of nasal sprays include:
For children:
For adults:
* runny nose
* headache
* sore throat
* cough
These side effects may not seem very serious, but it is worth noting that they are remarkably similar to flu symptoms. So while the CDC assures that nasal-spray flu vaccines will not give you the flu, well, they will give you flu symptoms.
This flu vaccine is not recommended for pregnant women or those with asthma, chronic lung or heart disease; chronic underlying medical conditions such as diabetes or kidney disorders; immune suppression or immune system problems; children or adolescents receiving aspirin therapy, anyone allergic to eggs; or those with a history of Guillain Barre syndrome. And it should not be given simultaneously with other vaccines.
If it is that safe, why the long list of people who should not be given this flu vaccine? Critics of nasal spray flu vaccines also point out that its most common flu vaccine side effect - runny nose - will result in the spreading of the flu virus.
So those vaccinated are advised to avoid close contact with immune-compromised individuals for at least 21 days. The question is, who are these "immune compromised individuals"? Well, they range from people with cancer and organ transplants to people with the flu and even people under stress - which can be just about anybody!
Some hospital personnel are asking those recently vaccinated with Flumist to avoid visiting patients in hospitals to prevent the risk of transmitting the vaccine strain virus to sick patients.
More serious flu vaccine side effects
The more serious possible flu vaccine side effects, however, are seldom discussed ny mainstream health authorities
There is emerging evidence that flu vaccine side effects include Alzheimer’s disease. Hugh Fudenberg, MD, an immunogeneticist and biologist, studied individuals who received flu shots over a 10-year period between 1970 and 1980. And he found that those who had five consecutive flu shots during the period had 10 times higher risks of developing Alzheimer's Disease, compared to those who had fewer than two flu shots.
Alzheimer's disease has been linked to both mercury and aluminium poisoning and both these substances are present, in toxic amounts, in flu vaccines.
In September 1995, however, the US FDA reported that five college students developed Guillian Barre Syndrome after receiving the meningococcal vaccine against meningitis - an illness with symptoms similar to those of the flu. And in November 2006, Canadian researchers reported a slight rise in the incidence of Guillian Barre Syndrome among those given flu shots.
And in the case of Tamiflu, which has become a highly sought antiviral flu drug in recent years, its side effects include abnormal behavior, neuropsychiatric problems like convulsions, delirium or delusions, and brain infections, In Japan, there were reported cases of young people commiting suicide after being given the Tamiflu vaccine.