The Reason for Childhood Diseases

By Philip F. Incao, M.D.

Acute inflammations like colds, flus and fevers seem to be an
inescapable part of life: everyone experiences them. Why do we get
them? Many of us have noticed (if not, then our spouses have noticed!)
that we often come down with a cold or flu when we are overly stressed
or depleted.

We explain this by assuming that stress lowers our resistance to the
viruses and bacteria that, we believe, like to attack us and make us
sick. Most of the time we peacefully co-exist with these microbes
which everywhere share our environment, and if we get sick it's often
because we've allowed ourselves to get out of balance. This applies to
children too, but only partially.

In children, studies have shown that respiratory infections increase
in frequency from birth until a peak by age 6 followed by a sharp
decline after age 7, irrespective of treatment. In other words, it
seems to be a normal feature of childhood to experience a variety of
acute inflammations, especially respiratory, in the first seven years
of life.

Prior to the advent of 20th century improvements in sanitation and
living standards, children had a high death rate in their first seven
years from these acute inflammations: measles, scarlet fever,
diphtheria, whooping cough and the common unnamed pneumonias and
diarrheas.

These have been the greatest threats to children throughout history,
and still are in developing countries.

In all modern nations children's deaths from such acute inflammations
have been steeply declining ever since 1900, and over 90% of the
decline occurred before the advent of antibiotics and vaccinations.
Polio is an important exception to this pattern.

Just before 1900, when all the other familiar life-threatening
children's illnesses were beginning to decline, the newcomer polio
made its first appearance in medical history and continued to grow in
importance until its abrupt decline with the advent of the Salk and
Sabin polio vaccines in the 1950's.

In the U.S. today what used to be the common dangerous infections of
childhood only account for about one percent of children's deaths. In
contrast to this, 7% of deaths in US children aged 1-19 are from
cancer, 7% are from suicide and a shocking 14% are from homicide.

Since 1960 there has been a sharp increase in both the frequency and
the severity of asthma in many developed nations. In the US, asthma
accounts for one percent of children's deaths -- equal to infections
-- and is a leading cause of childhood disability.

A growing body of medical research supports the commonsense idea that
children who experience frequent infections and inflammations in early
childhood will strengthen their immune systems and will be less prone
to allergies and asthma than children who rarely experience such
infections.

This idea is called "the hygiene hypothesis". Research has revealed a
list of factors which correlate with a decreased risk of asthma and
allergies, including the avoidance of vaccinations and antibiotics and
the blessings of growing up in a large family and having farm animals.

If the hygiene hypothesis proves to be correct, it will have a
revolutionary impact on medical practice. We will realize that when
children experience their cold and fevers, they are challenging their
immune systems and developing an inner strength which will be theirs
throughout life.

As with all challenges in childhood, our job as parents and healthcare
workers will be to strengthen the child to meet its challenges but not
to remove the challenges altogether. In any case, it's not possible in
the long run to eliminate challenges, but only to replace some kinds
of challenges with other kinds.

The blessing of modern medicine is that it has the tools and
techniques to ease suffering and save lives when we or our children
are in danger of being overwhelmed by illness.

Nevertheless, thwarting or suppressing illness does not automatically
create health, though it does grant us or our children the respite to
return to health thanks to our body's natural tendency to heal and to
restore balance.

Health and healing are mostly about developing our inner capacities to
adapt to change and to maintain balance as we move through life's
journey.

To truly foster the overall health and inner strength of our children,
we need to go beyond the short-sighted view of illnesses as hostile
aggressors and of children as helpless victims. Children are
individuals. Each child gets ill in his or her own individual way, and
each illness a child gets has a meaningful part to play among the
challenges belonging to that child's life.

Just like everything else in nature, individual illnesses exist within
a larger context of a balanced system. There is an ecology of human
illness. If we attempt to eliminate a single element of an ecological
system, we disturb the balance of the whole in ways which can lead to
unforeseen consequences.

To these unforeseen consequences belong the dramatic increases in
asthma, allergies, diabetes, autism, and learning dysfunctions
occurring in children today. These result, in part, from modern
medicine's failure to appreciate where the balance lies in health and
illness, and from its failure to grasp that when you push down on one
side of the balance, the other side goes up!

Our present effort to eradicate acute infectious diseases in children
through increasing numbers of vaccines has already long overshot the
healthy balance point, and is now helping to create in developed
nations more chronic disease and disability in children then ever
before.

To improve public health, health policy needs to shift its focus from
eradicating particular diseases to improving the social conditions
which breed disease, and physicians need to learn how to help our
individual patients to maintain balance in body, soul and spirit
throughout their lives.

If we physicians learn that, and if we apply it to ourselves as well,
then the overall health of our society cannot help but improve.

Contact Information:
Philip F. Incao, MD
1624 Gilpin Street
Denver, CO 80218-1633 (303) 321-2100 OFFICE
(303) 321-3737 FAX
E-mail: drincao@juno.com

Related Articles:

Tending The Flame by Philip Incao, MD

Seizures From Fevers Don't Cause Brain Injury

Vaccine Information - August 22 1999

Multiple Vaccines May Contribute To 'Gulf War Syndrome'

Vaccine News

Congressional Vaccine Testimony

Vaccination Dangers - Shots in the Dark

Vaccine Scene 2000 -- - Review and Update

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