To the editor:
I was saddened to read of the death of Iva Lee Sorensen's grandson in a recent letter to the editor. She wrote that he had died during a nap following a DTP immunization at the age of 2 months. Seeing these cute, smiling faces on the obituary page is always hard, and our hearts go out to their family.Unexplained death in children under one year happens in approximately one child in 500. No research has yet been able to find any way to predict which children are at risk.
Some unexplained deaths certainly do have a specific medical reason that just can't be detected, but clearly there is a syndrome of some sort where babies simply have unexplained death.
The peak age is 2 months to 4 months of age. In studies of large populations where some children are immunized at 2 months and some are not, the frequency of sudden infant death syndrome is the same whether the vaccine is received or not.
The Sorensens' grandchild may be a special case, and lots of research is devoted to SIDS and DTP vaccine, and hopefully there will be better answers in the future.
The DTP vaccine has been blamed for many years for causing harm to infants. Concern over this in Japan caused the number of young children immunized to fall from 78 percent in 1974 to 14 percent in 1976. In the next four years, there were 31,000 cases of pertussis (whooping cough) and 113 deaths. There are several times as many children left with brain damage from pertussis as die from it. A similar event occurred in England in the mid-1970s.
The problem with delaying immunizations until the child is older is that the young infant is most likely to die or get brain damage from pertussis. Also, pertussis is not rare. Approximately 50 percent of adults have lost their immunity to pertussis, and there is always a source of whooping cough to infect our infants. It is an unusual year that I don't see a case of pertussis in the office or hospital.
These days, each person who received a DTP will read an eight-page pamphlet explaining the pros and cons of the immunization. There is a consensus among researchers that immunization even with what risks may exist (1/300,000 maximum) is safer than not getting immunized, even in a developed country.
Until we have a perfect vaccine, parents will have to carefully consider the facts as they see them for their individual child, but results of a decline in immunization rates in other developed countries have generally been quite serious.
Wayne Cannon, M.D.
Salt Lake City