The CDC to Study Vaccine Induced Encephalopathy!

Finally! The CDC's Clinical Immunization Safety Assessment Network is currently looking for subjects to "evaluate the association between viral vaccines and encephalopathy/encephalitis through a detailed evaluation of children with encephalopathy/encephalitis as well as control children".

Their message to doctors:

"If you have a patient who you think might be eligible for the study, please complete the following two questions and provide your contact information. We thank you for your help in this important study."

This is a HUGELY important subject, one we have been waiting for them to examine, and we want to make sure that they have all the subjects they need for this study, so please take a moment to see if your child might be a candidate.

Does your child have an encephalopathy?

According to HHS's Vaccine Injury Compensation Table symptoms are:

Loss of eye contact
Seizures
Not responding to external stimuli
Seems disconnected from the world around them

And the Merck Manual notes that these symptoms can be preceded by:

Nonspecific Gastrointestinal disorders.

If this sounds like your child, because boy howdy it sounds just like mine, call your pediatrician and let him know about the study to see if your child indeed has an encephalopathy and should be enrolled!

Oh wait... hold on a second... there are some exclusion criteria... Let me check them out...

Ok... so if your child has the above, but DOESN'T have:

A history of medical disease
A history of congenital problems
A history of developmental delay
Any immune system dysfunction
Any family history of immune dysfunction
Fevers and Seizures with in 72 hours

THEN they want to study them to see if their encephalopathy might have anything to do with their vaccines. You know, the HEALTHY kids with encephalitis.

So as long as the swelling in your child's brain that was caused by vaccines didn't cause or was not related to any of the above symptoms, CDC wants to get to know your child.

But that pretty much counts our all our kids... now doesn't it.

Never mind.


UPDATE:   The day this post went up, the site with the study on it went down.  Quite a coincidence.

I check the wayback machine and found that the call out for this study, which can be found here, was posted at the end of 2004.  Was it ever undertaken? 

Since the study has been there for almost four years, and went down the day that I wrote about it, I am just going to go ahead and assume that the correlation of these two events is likely more than just a temporal association.