Who’s to blame for resurgence of deadly whooping cough?

Emotional rescue

Who’s to blame for the resurgence in whooping cough?

Could it be Jenny McCarthy?

Jenny McCarthy is the model and comic actress who’s become better known in recent years as an autism activist. She believes that childhood vaccines may have played a role in her own son’s autism.

I’ll bet she didn’t bargain for the medical mainstream backlash.

Google “Jenny McCarthy” and “whooping cough” and you’ll get more than 16,000 hits.

Some hits lead to blogs where McCarthy is blasted as the sole cause behind the surprising additional cases of whooping cough in California and other states. Some hits lead to forums where comments often turn quite ugly, directly blaming McCarthy for whooping cough-related deaths of children.

These postings portray McCarthy and other “anti-vaxxers” as delusional conspiracy theorists, ignorant of the science behind vaccines. And, of course, any notion that autism might be linked to vaccines in any way is dismissed as pure fantasy. (Drug company execs must love it when the average Joe does their PR work for them for free.)

But like all emotional debates, verifiable facts get lost along the way.

Focused on what matters

First of all, Jenny McCarthy isn’t anti-vaccine. She doesn’t even suggest that parents should avoid vaccinations for their children. A quick visit to her website reveals McCartney’s true mission: She’s anti-autism.

On the website’s homepage (generationrescue.org) you’ll find a couple of links to vaccine information. But the focus is on recovery from autism. In fact, it’s an excellent resource for parents who have an autistic child or suspect their child may be autistic.

But unlike anti-vaccine sites or sites that attempt to debunk vaccine avoidance, McCartney’s Generation Rescue site doesn’t go in for inflammatory rhetoric or name- calling.

For instance, here’s a vaccine/autism quote you’ll find from Dr. Bernadine Healy, former Director of the National Institutes of Health: “I think public health officials have been too quick to dismiss the hypothesis as irrational without sufficient studies of causation.”

Sounds pretty reasonable, doesn’t it? Far more reasonable than calling McCarthy a murderer and blaming her for single-handedly bringing back whooping cough.

In fact, new research suggests the whooping cough vaccine itself might make sensitive individuals more vulnerable to the disease.

The primary agent of whooping cough infection is a bacterium called Bordetella pertussis. But another infectious agent that sometimes causes whooping cough– Bordetella parapertussis–is becoming more common.

The new research reveals that the whooping cough vaccine (which contains only B. pertussis antigens) may actually impede immunity against B. parapertussis. In fact, it appears the vaccine prompts a significant increase in B. parapertussis lung colony-forming units.

No matter how you cut it, that’s not Jenny McCarthy’s fault.

A few weeks ago I mentioned another angle the vaccine defenders haven’t grasped. California medical records show that counties with low childhood vaccination rates have about the same number of whooping cough cases as counties with high vaccination rates.

So can we cut Jenny McCarthy some slack? After all, the notion that vaccines don’t have side effects, well…that’s pure fantasy.

To Your Good Health,

Jenny Thompson

Sources:
“An Inconvenient Mutation” Weston A. Price Foundation, 9/22/10, westonaprice.org
“Vaccination Is Steady, but Pertussis Is Surging” Tara Parker-Pope, New York Times, 8/16/10, well.blogs.nytimes.com