Five Month-Old Baby Dies Just Days After 8 Vaccinations – Parents Are Charged With Her Murder

VacTruth

by Christina England

Parents in South Africa are facing life in prison for the murder of their baby girl who died just days after receiving routine vaccinations. Baby A had received all her vaccinations on time. On September 25, 2012, when she was aged just five months, her parents took her to their local clinic, where she received a total of eight vaccinations before being sent home.

Baby A’s mother told VacTruth that the vaccinations were administered extremely harshly, with the nurse appearing to stab their daughter viciously with a variety of needles. Baby A received eight vaccines in total, the five-in-one vaccine Pentaxim said to protect against diphtheria, tetanus, acellular pertussis, haemophilus influenza type B (Hib) and polio; the hepatitis B vaccine; the rotavirus vaccine; and a vaccine said to protect babies against pneumocococcal and non-typeable haemophilus influenzae disease, Prenevar/Prenvar.

Her mother explained that after her ordeal, Baby A was irritable, upset and had difficulty in settling. That the following day, she was unable to move her legs, which remained hard and swollen around the injection site for several days.

Amazingly, this was not the first time that Baby A had suffered from this side effect. Her mother told VacTruth that her legs had become swollen after vaccinations before, when they had remained swollen for several weeks. When Baby A’s parents asked the nurses at the clinic why their daughter’s legs were swollen, they were told that it may have been due to the technique that was used at the time of vaccination.

The nurses recorded this reaction on Baby A’s vaccination card and told Baby A’s mother to use a warm face towel and massage her legs. When Baby A suffered the same side effect after vaccinations given on September 25, 2012, Mrs. A immediately used a warm face towel to soothe her daughter’s legs and lessen the swelling.

So, why weren’t the healthcare providers concerned about this reaction?

“She Turned Blue and We Tried to Give Her CPR”

On October 9, 2012, Baby A appeared to be her normal self, playing, kicking and smiling; however, the next day things were very different. Mrs. A explains:

“Baby A woke up and appeared to be crabby and running a high fever. She was only was happy if we were holding her and carrying her. That day, I gave her Panado and was dabbing her with a cool face towel to bring the fever down. At about 15:30 or so I had just finished feeding her and gave her to my husband to burp and as he was burping he heard her gasp for like a breath of air and when I looked at her she had collapsed on his shoulder and wasn’t breathing. She turned blue and we tried to give her CPR but as we were doing that she was throwing up and still was not breathing.

We decided to rush her to the nearest hospital but we were unfortunate as there was traffic at the time and only got there at about 16:00. I could be off a few minutes, we took her into the trauma unit and they took her from us and told us to wait in a separate room. They managed to resuscitate her and put her in the NICU, they then took her to get a CT scan and then said they needed to take x-rays as well.”

After what seemed like forever, the doctor appeared and informed the anxious parents that their daughter had blood on her brain and appeared to have been shaken. He said that the little girl had multiple fractures of the long bones.

When Mr. and Mrs. A asked the doctor what had happened to their daughter, the doctor was abrupt, saying, “I don’t know, I wasn’t there, why don’t you tell me?”

Mrs A. told VacTruth that she felt that his comment was uncalled for and insulting and that she could not understand what he was implying. She said:

“We were so upset, how could he say that? What was he implying? That was our baby there and we didn’t know what had happened.”

She told me that she had turned to the doctor treating Baby A and said to him:

“You are the doctor, you are supposed to help us. All of a sudden everything we had got taken away, our life, our 24 hours a day, we have nothing left to do now but wait for some sort of answer as to why our baby is lying there. I don’t know what this shaken baby syndrome is, no one shook our baby. We were there, that’s not an answer, we need an answer.”

Caltech Finds Link Between Immune Irregularities and Autism

Science Blog

Scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) pioneered the study of the link between irregularities in the immune system and neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism a decade ago. Since then, studies of postmortem brains and of individuals with autism, as well as epidemiological studies, have supported the correlation between alterations in the immune system and autism spectrum disorder.

What has remained unanswered, however, is whether the immune changes play a causative role in the development of the disease or are merely a side effect. Now a new Caltech study suggests that specific changes in an overactive immune system can indeed contribute to autism-like behaviors in mice, and that in some cases, this activation can be related to what a developing fetus experiences in the womb.

The results appear in a paper this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

“We have long suspected that the immune system plays a role in the development of autism spectrum disorder,” says Paul Patterson, the Anne P. and Benjamin F. Biaggini Professor of Biological Sciences at Caltech, who led the work. “In our studies of a mouse model based on an environmental risk factor for autism, we find that the immune system of the mother is a key factor in the eventual abnormal behaviors in the offspring.”

The first step in the work was establishing a mouse model that tied the autism-related behaviors together with immune changes. Several large epidemiological studies—including one that involved tracking the medical history of every person born in Denmark between 1980 and 2005—have found a correlation between viral infection during the first trimester of a mother’s pregnancy and a higher risk for autism spectrum disorder in her child. To model this in mice, the researchers injected pregnant mothers with a viral mimic that triggered the same type of immune response a viral infection would.

“In mice, this single insult to the mother translates into autism-related behavioral abnormalities and neuropathologies in the offspring,” says Elaine Hsiao, a graduate student in Patterson’s lab and lead author of the PNAS paper.

The team found that the offspring exhibit the core behavioral symptoms associated with autism spectrum disorder—repetitive or stereotyped behaviors, decreased social interactions, and impaired communication. In mice, this translates to such behaviors as compulsively burying marbles placed in their cage, excessively self grooming, choosing to spend time alone or with a toy rather than interacting with a new mouse, or vocalizing ultrasonically less often or in an altered way compared to typical mice.

Next, the researchers characterized the immune system of the offspring of mothers that had been infected and found that the offspring display a number of immune changes. Some of those changes parallel those seen in people with autism, including decreased levels of regulatory T cells, which play a key role in suppressing the immune response. Taken together, the observed immune alterations add up to an immune system in overdrive—one that promotes inflammation.

“Remarkably, we saw these immune abnormalities in both young and adult offspring of immune-activated mothers,” Hsiao says. “This tells us that a prenatal challenge can result in long-term consequences for health and development.”

With the mouse model established, the group was then able to test whether the offspring’s immune problems contribute to their autism-related behaviors. In the most revealing test of this hypothesis, the researchers were able to correct many of the autism-like behaviors in the offspring of immune-activated mothers by giving the offspring a bone-marrow transplant from typical mice. The normal stem cells in the transplanted bone marrow not only replenished the immune system of the host animals but altered their autism-like behavioral impairments.

The researchers emphasize that because the work was conducted in mice, the results cannot be readily extrapolated to humans, and they certainly do not suggest that bone-marrow transplants should be considered as a treatment for autism. They also have yet to establish whether it was the infusion of stem cells or the bone-marrow transplant procedure itself—complete with irradiation—that corrected the behaviors.

However, Patterson says, the results do suggest that immune irregularities in children could be an important target for innovative immune manipulations in addressing the behaviors associated with autism spectrum disorder. By correcting these immune problems, he says, it might be possible to ameliorate some of the classic developmental delays seen in autism. In future studies, the researchers plan to examine the effects of highly targeted anti-inflammatory treatments on mice that display autism-related behaviors and immune changes. They are also interested in considering the gastrointestinal (GI) bacteria, or microbiota, of such mice. Coauthor Sarkis Mazmanian, a professor of biology at Caltech, has shown that gut bacteria are intimately tied to the function of the immune system. He and Patterson are investigating whether changes to the microbiota of these mice might also influence their autism-related behaviors.

Along with Patterson, Hsiao, and Mazmanian, additional Caltech coauthors on the PNAS paper, “Modeling an autism risk factor in mice leads to permanent immune dysregulation,” are Mazmanian lab manager Sara McBride and former graduate student Janet Chow. The work was supported by an Autism Speaks Weatherstone Fellowship, National Institutes of Health Graduate Training Grants, a Weston Havens Foundation grant, a Gregory O. and Jennifer W. Johnson Caltech Innovation Fellowship, a Caltech Innovation grant, and a Congressionally Directed Medical Research Program Idea Development Award.