Hilary's Desk

Medical articles on neonatal immunity, habitually refer to a baby’s immune system as "defective"; "impaired"; "slow"; "inadequate"; "compromised" or "deficient".  Usually they end with the suggestion to add exogenous compounds to “correct X defect”. Even better, to manipulate and correct them all, making a baby’s immune system “perfect” in their human understanding.

Arstechnica editorialised on a letter in Nature, in which doctors had figured out that, “ Keeping the immune system in check helps the development of healthy gut bacteria.”

The authors were surprised to find that….

“For their part, the infants seem to be tamping down their immune response to allow the beneficial bacteria to establish themselves. Obviously, this also makes them more susceptible to infection from dangerous bacteria as well, so developing a healthy microbiome is a bit of a tradeoff. The authors of the Cincinnati hospital study call it "unfortunate by-product of the greater benefits of active suppression during this crucial developmental period, when tolerance to commensal microbes is more uniformly advantageous."

Having realised there is a good reason for this immune system tamping down, they swept on to a new grand fallacy that hyporesponsiveness to infection is itself, still a defect!

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A quote from an article in a Canadian magazine, "Alive".

"A carefully controlled media has established "science" in our minds as fact... Science is merely an investigation, logically arranged and systematized. Science changes it's mind regularly and no-one seems to care. We believe the new hypothesis just as devoutly as we followed the first."

Pertussis (whooping cough) is a good example. In 1981, the brochure said, three jabs would make you immune for life. Then as time went on, they dropped to two.  Then suddenly went back to three jabs.  Then the next brochure decreed four, .... then five, .... then six, ....and in some countries, seven.

Now the “truth” adds on to that, "every pregnancy" and everyone around the new baby, "every pregnancy".

Next it will be your dog as well.  Continue Reading