Rob T. over at Science-Based Parenting blog just posted a review of tonight’s Dateline NBC special, Dose of Controversy. He says that although Matt Lauer interviewed several people to refute the claim that vaccines cause autism, including reporter Brian Deer and vaccine expert Dr. Paul Offit, in the end, Matt dropped the ball.

So they explained the controversy, and they had some good takeaways for parents, but all in all, Dateline failed to spend enough time pounding home the multiple studies that have shown no link between vaccines and autism.  Sure, they mentioned the conflicting studies in passing a couple of times, but then they spent an entire segment on an 11-year-old getting a controversial treatment at Dr. Wakefield’s Thoughtful House.  If they truly wanted to have their show be science based, they would have spent a segment on those other studies.

Head on over there and read Rob’s entire review.

My brother-in-law maintains that every child needs to eat a handful of dirt now and again to boost his or her immune system. There was a great article in the New York Times this week agreeing with this theory.

Babies Know: A Little Dirt is Good for You

A quick excerpt:

One leading researcher, Dr. Joel V. Weinstock, the director of gastroenterology and hepatology at Tufts Medical Center in Boston, said in an interview that the immune system at birth “is like an unprogrammed computer. It needs instruction.”


He said that public health measures like cleaning up contaminated water and food have saved the lives of countless children, but they “also eliminated exposure to many organisms that are probably good for us.”


“Children raised in an ultraclean environment,” he added, “are not being exposed to organisms that help them develop appropriate immune regulatory circuits.”

So, don’t obsess and over sanitize for your kids. Their bodies need to be exposed to bacteria and germs now and again. And, maybe even the occasional mud pie.

When my daughter caught her first cold in the daycare at the YMCA, people told me that it was, in the long run, a good thing. Getting sick now, they said, would build her immune system and make her stronger. If it didn’t happen in daycare, then it’d happen in preschool. No matter how much I wanted to protect her, she would eventually have to go through a period of illness. Getting sick was a right of passage into the world of immunity. Was this an old wives’ tale, I wondered, or was there any truth to it?

» Continue reading “Fact or Fiction? “Building” Your Child’s Immunity Through Illness”