by Dr Viera Scheibner (PhD)
Health Impact News

Scurvy and vaccination

Scurvy usually evokes the images of the mariners suddenly dying on long sea voyages due to their diet of worm-riddled dry biscuits. It took Lind 40 years to persuade the British Admiralty to mandate fresh fruit and vegetables for the long seafaring troops.

Scurvy is especially significant for humans because the primates, unlike most other animals, do not produce their own vitamin C and must rely on its sufficient intake from the ingested food.

In the Middle Ages, due to the mass urbanization (when poor people moved in droves from the agricultural areas into the cities) and the Old World’s staple diet of bread and some meat, scurvy was the biggest scourge of the Europeans resulting in generally poor health and low life expectancy of 25 years. The resistance to infectious diseases was poor and infectious diseases used to decimate  whole communities.

Thanks to the horticultural revolution of growing vegetables such as cabbage (and its fermented form sauerkraut), potatoes and tomatoes and including them into the daily food consumption, the overall life expectancy of 25 years increased to 70 years and the general health vastly improved. The resistance to infectious diseases has increased and was accompanied with a substantial fall in untimely mortality. Natural infectious diseases such as measles became mild diseases and often occurred in a sub-clinical form.

However, scurvy still occurs, especially in a sub-clinical form, and increasingly with mass vaccination which depletes the vitamin C reserves, particularly in babies and children, starting with smallpox vaccination.

Gilman and Tanzer (1932) wrote that the haemorrhagic diathesis of scurvy has been recognized since the time of Hippocrates.

Hemorrhage occurs most commonly beneath the periosteum of the lung, bones and into joint spaces, but frequently involves the skin, mucous membranes, orbits and serous cavities.  The occurrence of subdural hemorrhages in a case of infantile scurvy in which an operation was performed in this hospital, has led us to review the literature from similar cases.

They quoted Willis, an English physician who in a treatise on scurvy published in 1669, mentioned the occurrence of “intracranial hemorrhages” in the course of this disease, an observation that was apparently based on pathological examination:

Two hundred years later, in 1871, in a review of the pathology of scurvy, Hayem presented the first case of hemorrhagic pachymeningitis associated with scurvy. To Sutherland, however, must be attributed the first accurate clinical and pathological report of this condition.

In 1884 he described the case of rhachitic and a scorbutic infant of 14 months who developed one month before death rigidity of the upper arm, followed by an intermittent tonic spasm of the muscles of this arm and conjugate deviation of the eyes to the right. At autopsy there was found in the subdural space a dense, fibrinous mass loosely adherent to the  undersurface of the dura.

Beneath this lay a layer of “soft, coagulated lymph”, which was separated from the first tissue by a dense, white membrane. The spinal canal likewise revealed a deposit of soft, reddened gelatinous material lying just beneath the dural covering.

The same paper also includes a history of a 2 year old girl who, in addition to the usual picture of scurvy, presented on the second day of admission with rigidity of the neck, dilated pupils, deviation of the head and eyes to the left and spasmodic contractions of the muscles of both arms. An autopsy the following day revealed a large blood clot over the superior surface of the brain bilaterally. This clot lay between the dura and cortex (relation to arachnoid membrane not specified) and stained the surface of the cortex.  The extravasation beneath the dura was evidently of some duration, as a considerable degree of organisation was present.  An additional finding of interest was the appearance of two subcortical hemorrhages, a condition not described elsewhere in the literature.

Hess (1920) described remarkably competently the typical scurvy haemorrhages such as into the gums, frenulum, skin and bones, into the stomach, intestines (with fatty infiltrates into the liver), into the eye, under the conjunctiva or into the anterior chamber leading to the destruction of the eyeball, petechial haemorrhages into the lungs, pericardium, meningeal bleeding, which may give rise to apoplexy, haemorrhaging into scapula, periosteum and joints, with bizarre fractures of the long bones, ribs (separation at the costo-chondral junctions resulting in bleeding), separation of the epiphyses of the head of the humerus, and partial or complete separation of the lower ends of the femur, bleeding into muscles between the dilated ventricles, and right hypertrophy of the heart, pale and tough heart muscle, the cardiorespiratory syndrome, oedema etc.  Scurvy affects all systems of the body as is well-known in the scurvic babies.

While it is not surprising that scurvy still occurs in the twenty first century, it is surprising that modern doctors generally fail to recognize it.

Simple administration of sufficient doses of sodium ascorbate (a non acidic form of vitamin C) would save a very large number of premature deaths as demonstrated by Levy (2012) in his article Vitamin C prevents vaccination side effects; increases effectiveness.

The history of vaccines causing scurvy.  Many parents falsely accused of inflicted injury – the infamous shaken baby syndrome

Amiel (1975) described striking increase in cerebral vascular permeability in mice within 24 hours of intravenous infusion of Bordetella pertussis vaccine. This declined within 48 hours but remained at a fractionally higher level at 7 days. The effect was increased by a second administration of pertussis vaccine 24 hours after the first and suggested that changes in cerebral blood vessels may be involved in the evolution of encephalopathy attributed to Bordetella pertussis vaccine in man.

Caffey (1946) considered fractures in the long bones as a complication of the infantile subdural haematoma associated with the fractures of the cranium. Even though his own illustrations show what is universally considered typical scurvy fractures, he denied any “roentgen signs of scurvy”. He speculated that, “the fractures appear to be of traumatic origin being the traumatic episodes and the causal mechanism remain obscure.” Later on, in 1972, he speculated that “all of these metaphyseal avulsions appeared to result from indirect traction, stretching and sheering, acceleration and deceleration stresses on the periosteum and articular capsules, rather that direct impact stresses such as smashing blows on the bone itself,” and called these findings “traumatic involucra.”

Caffey (1965) admitted that he was not a formally trained paediatric roengenologist.

Guthkelch (1971) wrote:

Subdural haematoma is one of the commonest features of the battered child syndrome, yet by no means all patients so affected have external marks of injury on the head.  This suggests that in some cases repeated acceleration-deceleration rather than direct violence is the cause of the haemorrhage, the infant having been shaken rather than struck by its parent. Such an hypothesis might also explain the remarkable frequency of the finding of subdural haemorrhage in battered children as compared with its incidence in head injuries of other origins and the fact that it is so often bilateral.

Just as Caffey, Guthkelch failed to provide any factual evidence for his speculation and simply accepted some of Caffeys’ terminology.

Recently, Guthkelch went into damage control by claiming that he was misinterpreted and even went to some court hearings to tell the judge that other, natural, causes played the main role. No mention of vaccines as the primary “natural” cause.

Considering that tens of thousands of innocent parents and other care givers are serving long prison terms and others are still being accused of SBS, a non-existent invalid syndrome Guthkelch is responsible for, it is too little too late.

Hiller (1972), an Australian formally qualified roentgenologist, demonstrated that Caffey’s misunderstood bizarre fractures are in fact caused by scurvy, even though he did not explain what actually caused scurvy in small babies.

Most people, including babies, have only marginal reserves of vitamin C.  Injections of vaccines containing a great number of toxic substances, such as formaldehyde, mercury and aluminium compounds, as preservatives and adjuvants, and foreign proteins (antigens) – bacteria and viruses and other microorganisms – are the primary and documented cause of harmful immune response anaphylaxis (=sensitisation, suppressed immune system, increased susceptibility to the targeted diseases and related and unrelated bacterial and viral infections), as described by Samore and Siber (1992) in infant rats and Daum et al. (1989) in human babies.

Depletion of vitamin C reserves was linked to vaccination by Pekarek and Rezabek (1959) who demonstrated that when the rats are injected with pertussis vaccine, they develop an acute scurvy.  The difference between rats and human babies is in that the rats produce their own vitamin C and recover fast, unlike the humans who do not.

The late Dr Archie Kalokerinos, dealt with scurvy in Australian Aboriginal babies. In the early 1970s, Archie was perplexed why so many Aboriginal babies were dying suddenly and apparently without any obvious reason.

In an introduction to his book Every Second Child (1981) he described baby Evelyn, normal at birth, “But at six months she was emaciated, weak, dying…and covered with bruises.” For the medical authorities and the police, this was an open and shut case of child abuse. But Archie knew better and saw the Baby Evelyn case for what it was: Sudden Infant death syndrome or Crib death, resulting from the standard Aboriginal diet of junk food, worthless baby formula and no vitamin C.

Thanks to his evidence, Nancy was declared innocent one month before her sentence for killing her baby was completed.

Archie remembered that at that time the health authorities stepped up their immunization campaign and vaccinated indiscriminately all Aboriginal infants. No wonder that so many of them died. However, the authorities were not prepared to listen and even denied that vitamin C deficiency was part of the problem. Nevertheless, Archie continued administering vitamin C and lowered the rate of SIDS at least in his area.

The primary pathology of scurvy is immunological vasculitis, as is also characteristic of the vaccines’ deleterious effects.

A great number of terms were introduced to describe immunological vasculitis, such as Kawasaki Disease, Stevens-Johnson and Henoch-Schonlein (or Schonlein-Henoch) syndrome.

One can quote innumerable articles linking immunological vasculitis to vaccines and scurvy.

Indeed, product inserts for all vaccines list Kawasaki Disease and some also the synonymous Henoch-Schonlein Syndrome, both being the characteristic vascular inflammation resulting in what appears as petechial or larger spot-like bizarre red spots on the face, torso, buttocks, ear lobes, at the base of scalp hair, misinterpreted as bruises, as well as subdural, subarachnoid, retinal haemorrhages and bizarre fractures of long bones, ribs and rib separations at costo-chondral junctions, indeed all the well-known sign of scurvy known since time immemorial.

The question only remains why much of the modern medical profession doesn’t seem to know this and instead resorts to accusing the parents of small babies of causing the symptoms.

Kirschner and Stein (1985) wrote:

…the treating physicians in the emergency room mistook life-threatening illness or postmortem artefacts for inflicted injury…Although the histories related by the parents in the emergency room were in all cases truthful and consistent with the results of physical examinations of the child, the involved physicians failed to make a correct diagnosis. Not only lack or experience with severe childhood illness and death but also an attitude of suspicion and hostility probably contributed to those misdiagnoses.

About the Author

Dr Viera Scheibner is Principal Research Scientist (Retired) with a doctorate in Natural Sciences from Comenius University in Bratislava. After an eminent scientific career in micropalaeontology during which she published 3 books and some 90 scientific papers in refereed scientific journals in Australia and overseas, she studied babies’ breathing patterns with the Cotwatch breathing monitor developed by her late husband Leif Karlsson in the mid 1980s. Babies had alarms after vaccination, indicating stress. This introduced her to the subject of vaccination. She then started systematically studying orthodox medical papers dealing with vaccination issues. To this day she has collected and studied more than 100,000 pages of medical papers.

Her research into vaccination has culminated so far in two books and a number of shorter and longer individual papers published in a variety of scientific and medical publications. She has also conducted frequent international lecture tours to present the results of her research to parents, health and medical professionals and anyone else who is interested. She has also provided a great number of expert witness reports for court cases relating to deaths and injuries caused by vaccines, such as so-called “shaken baby” syndrome. (vierascheibner.com)

Articles by Dr Viera Scheibner

The sordid history of Poliomyelitis vaccination

Outbreaks of whooping cough (pertussis) in the vaccination era.

The ineffectiveness and unintended consequences of measles vaccination

Measles Vaccines Part II; Benefits of Contracting Measles

The documented effects of vaccines as shown by orthodox medical research

Comment on this article on VaccineImpact.com

References

• Gilman and Tanzer 1932. Subdural hematoma in infantiles curvy. JAMA; 99(12): 989-997.
• Hiller 1972. Battered or not – the reappraisal of metaphyseal fragility. Am J Roengenol Radiol Therapy & Nuclear medicine; 114(2): 241-245.
• Hess 1920. Scurvy – past and present. JB Lippincott Company, 279 pp.
• Amiel 1976. The effects of Bordetella pertussis vaccine on cerebral vascular permeability. Br J Experimental Pathology; 57: 653-662.
• Caffey 1946. Multiple fractures in the long bones of infants suffering from subdural hematoma. Am J Roentgenology; 56: 163-173.
• Caffey 1972. On the theory and practice of shaking babies. Am J Dis Childhood; 124(2): 161-169.
• Guthkelch 1971. Infantile subdural haematoma and its relationship to whiplash injuries. BMJ; 22May: 430-431.
• Scheibner 2008. Unexplained fractures explained. BMJ.com 12 December, rapid response.
• Caffey 1965. Significance of the history of the diagnosis of traumatic injury in children. J Pediatrics; 67(5): 1008-1014.
• Samore and Siber 1991. Effect of pertussis toxin on susceptibility of infant rats to Haemophilus influenzae Type b. J Infect Dis; 165: 945-948.
• Daum et al. 1989. Decline in serum antibody to the capsule of Haemophilus influenzae type b in the immediate postimmunization period. J Pediatr; May ; 114(5)(: 742-747.
• Kalokerinos. 1981. Every second child. Keats Publishing Inc. New Canaan, Connecticut.
• Kirschner and Stein 1985. The mistaken diagnosis of child abuse: A form of medical abuse? Arch Dis Child; 139: 873-875.

Medical Doctors Opposed to Forced Vaccinations – Should Their Views be Silenced?

One of the biggest myths being propagated in the compliant mainstream media today is that doctors are either pro-vaccine or anti-vaccine, and that the anti-vaccine doctors are all “quacks.”

However, nothing could be further from the truth in the vaccine debate. Doctors are not unified at all on their positions regarding “the science” of vaccines, nor are they unified in the position of removing informed consent to a medical procedure like vaccines.

The two most extreme positions are those doctors who are 100% against vaccines and do not administer them at all, and those doctors that believe that ALL vaccines are safe and effective for ALL people, ALL the time, by force if necessary.

Very few doctors fall into either of these two extremist positions, and yet it is the extreme pro-vaccine position that is presented by the U.S. Government and mainstream media as being the dominant position of the medical field.

In between these two extreme views, however, is where the vast majority of doctors practicing today would probably categorize their position. Many doctors who consider themselves “pro-vaccine,” for example, do not believe that every single vaccine is appropriate for every single individual.

Many doctors recommend a “delayed” vaccine schedule for some patients, and not always the recommended one-size-fits-all CDC childhood schedule. Other doctors choose to recommend vaccines based on the actual science and merit of each vaccine, recommending some, while determining that others are not worth the risk for children, such as the suspect seasonal flu shot.

These doctors who do not hold extreme positions would be opposed to government-mandated vaccinations and the removal of all parental exemptions.

In this article, I am going to summarize the many doctors today who do not take the most extremist pro-vaccine position, which is probably not held by very many doctors at all, in spite of what the pharmaceutical industry, the federal government, and the mainstream media would like the public to believe.