Safety and Effectiveness of Herbs and Pharmaceuticals

At lest in the case of the Inuit this is also a population with previously generally low life expectancies. That isn't to suggest that the large changes in Inuit lifestyles in the modern era haven't contributed significantly to cance incidence. But to ascribe it all to processed foods is facile and overlooks other major causative factors that are well established, such as smoking, exercise, other dietary factors, patterns of childbirth and breastfeeding, seems naive.TTFN,WK

I'm not sure why you take this tack. Surely we want a General Medical Council that ousts those who don't play by its rules? Isn't the entire idea of a professional governing body that it enforces standards of practice?I understand this isn't the case in Alt. Med. where the rule seems to be that professional bodies are there to spin FUD while encouraging their members to hide the bodies while they can, see the British Chiropractic Association's response to Simon Singh for some lovely examples of this, but surely in actual real world grown up medical practice this is exactly the sort of thing we want to see happening?TTFN,WK

Because of pressure from anti-vax people spinning FUD about it, as you yourself do here. There was no clinical reason, no evidence of any damage all the evidence still says that thimerosal is safe, it was a political response.Thimerosal is only there as a preservative, if people won't get their children vaccinated because of its presence then it is responsible to remove it so that more people will vaccinate. It ends up costing more on vaccines in the long run because they go off quicker, but if it gets wider coverage of the vaccines that is a worthwhile trade off.TTFN,WK

Funnily the actual paper, (Martin et al, 2003), doesn't see it quite that way ... And it would certainly be misleading to make out this is some general trend from vaccination, the paper goes on to note ... The antibody levels also were not persistently substantially higher, they were higher in response to a repeated immune challenge. In other words these children were not immunosupressed in any way, in fact they had a more intense immune response, in terms of antibody levels, to repeated challenges than did the adults in the study.To call it a completely abnormal response is like saying that having all one's teeth fall out is abnormal, and yet all children have this happen. Recognising a difference in immune responses between newborns and adults doesn't make one normal and the other abnormal.TTFN,WK

I doubt it will be available on the internet, unless one of the authors has a copy posted somewhere.I'm not sure what you are asking about how vaccination affects their immune response. A study comparing vaccinated and unvaccinated children for HBV infection and chronic infection shows that they have, as you would expect, higher levels of antibody to HBV and lower rates of infection (Van der Sande et al., 2007). Other than that I'm not sure what sort of things you think they should be looking at.I'm not sure how viable the very general assessment of 'health' you want is, there is a very high likelihood that unless you go in with a quite specific hypothesis your analysis may well turn up something different between vaccinated and un-vaccinated groups, but the chances of it being significant are massively reduced. It is also going to be a nightmare to control a study like this since rates of vaccination are by no means consistent across different segments of society.In the meantime there is an open access review (Marchant and Goldman, 200) which looks at several different immune responses and how they differ between adults and newborns, the Martin paper is one of the cases they cover.TTFN,WKEdited by Wounded King, : No reason given.

That vaccines promote a Th2 mediated response should be trivially obvious. The whole point of vaccination is to impart long term adaptive immunity and that is something that the Th2 system has to play a major role in since it primarily stimulates the B cells which form plasma cells and most importantly B memory cells. The idea that vaccination promotes this at the expense of the Th1 system is one that doens't really seem to have any evidence supporting it. Most research seems rather to favour an absence of suitable immunological challenges as the cause of a lack of development of the Th1 system, i.e. the hygeine hypothesis (Stromberg and Carlson, 2010.This simplistic Th1 good -Th2 bad way of thinking doesn't help anyone. Indeed there is research suggesting that increased Th1 responses are associated with Autism spectrum disorders (Li et al., 2009).TTFN,WK