Vaccinations?

[danvolker]

Your exaggerations are getting way out there...!

Don, with you enjoying the role as one of the more colorful characters of Scubaboard, there could never be too much exaggeration where you are concerned...

 

[peterbj7]

I find quite a lot of this thread amusing. I live in Belize, mostly on Ambergris Caye, and take no preventative medicines. Nor does anyone I know. I do travel inland from time to time and I would say the raised risks of contracting something there are low, albeit not zero.

What I find amusing and worrying is the suggestion that immunisation gives 100% protection. That is most certainly not true. I don't know what current prophlactics are used for the standard recognised risks, but in the past I have contracted Hep A, Malaria, yellow Fever and Typhoid, in every case DESPITE taking the then approved prophlactics. The nastiest of those diseases and those which have had the greatest lasting effect have been Hep A and malaria. Hep A can be contracted by anyone anywhere - I got it in Egypt - and as others have said is usually passed by dirty water. There I was tricked into drinking water that I thought was bottled, but it turned out the bottle had been refilled. The malaria (mine was tertiary cerebral) was contracted despite my being extremely careful to follow all the rules. The point is that any single insect bite can be the one that gives you malaria or dengue, no matter what you're taking to protect yourself. You have to protect yourself from being bitten, and no matter what you may think of DEET it's quite innocuous compared with Malaria.

 

[vladimir]

I live in Belize, mostly on Ambergris Caye, and take no preventative medicines. Nor does anyone I know. I do travel inland from time to time and I would say the raised risks of contracting something there are low, albeit not zero.​

Finally, the local knowledge the OP was looking for.

​

What I find amusing and worrying is the suggestion that immunisation gives 100% protection. That is most certainly not true. I don't know what current prophlactics are used for the standard recognised risks, but in the past I have contracted Hep A, Malaria, yellow Fever and Typhoid, in every case DESPITE taking the then approved prophlactics.

I didn't see where it was suggested that prophylaxis confers 100% protection, but the hepatitis A vaccine is claimed to be 95% effective.* It was only introduced in the 1990s though, so if you contracted hepatitis A before that, and in spite of prophylaxis, you were probably getting gamma globulin. Gamma globulin, as I understand it, gives a boost to your immune system in general, and doesn't confer specific immunity the way a vaccine does.

It is generally acknowledged that malarial prophylaxis is not 100% effective. Users are invariably cautioned to take steps to avoid mosquitos in addition to taking the drug. The same with typhoid vaccine—users still have to be careful about their food and water.

*I don't know if that means it creates antibodies in 95% of users, or if it prevents infection in 95% of users. Although I have had the course of vaccinations, a blood test does not detect hepatitis antibodies; perhaps I'm in the 5%.

 

[sbroh]

Perhaps someone can help me pin down what districts the following things are located in/what districts we have to go through to get to them:

1. Lamanai Ruins-- the tour description says you are on the Northern River to Bomba Village and then a bus takes you to Tower Hill where we then go down the New River to Lamanai.

2. Altun Ha - again, Northern River, Bomba Village, go through several other villages on the way to Altun Ha (and then Maruba Jungle Spa or something?)

3. Belize Zoo and Cave Tubing-- up the Belize River to a bus that takes you to Belize Zoo, then to Jaguar Paw Lodge which starts a 40 min "light hike" through the jungle to a cave system we then tube through.

I appreciate all the input and help thus far! We haven't really decided what we are doing for certain on the mainland trip days, but those are our most likely options.

 

[Downing]

It appears your starting point is AC, right?

Bomba's in the Corozal District. From there you'll cross into the Orange Walk District to Lamanai.

Altun-Ha's just across the Corozal District line into Orange Walk again. A-H is a lot closer to the coast and just off the Old Northern Highway. It's also close to the airport and makes for a good way to spend the morning if you have an afternoon flight out.

Cave tubing and the Belize Zoo are in the Belize District, fairly close to each other. I'm guessing you'll go south on the Northern Highway and cut over to Hattiesville to hook up with the Southern Highway (try not to miss the prison on the right, lol). I think you come to the Zoo first, on the right, then cave tubing further down the Southern Highway on the left.

Assuming you do all those things, you'll see a fair chunk of northern Belize.

 

[Hank49]

Finally, the local knowledge the OP was looking for.

​

I didn't see where it was suggested that prophylaxis confers 100% protection, but the hepatitis A vaccine is claimed to be 95% effective.* It was only introduced in the 1990s though, so if you contracted hepatitis A before that, and in spite of prophylaxis, you were probably getting gamma globulin. Gamma globulin, as I understand it, gives a boost to your immune system in general, and doesn't confer specific immunity the way a vaccine does.

.

When I was first moving to the Philippines in 1986 the doctor on Kauai suggested I get a gamma globulin shot. I went along with it until he pulled out a hypodermic that looked like a Coke can with a framing nail sticking out of it.
I've been in Belize for 12 years and have never had any immunizations, except tetanus. But that was a routine thing after I cut myself doing something...I forget what. I also lived in the Philippines and Malaysia for a total of 13 years with no immunizations.
I hear locals say they got Malaria but I'm not sure how they confirmed it. Anyway, it seems to be more like a flu here than like the hardcore malarias they have in Africa or Madagascar.
But if I'm on restaurants, I don't eat raw vegetables. Only cooked foods. At home, where I wash it, anything goes.

 

[peterbj7]

Lamanai and Altun Ha are both on low-lying land due west of Ambergris Caye and north of Belize City. The Zoo is on similarly low-lying land roughly west of Belize City. In order of desirability to visit I'd rank them Lamanai - Zoo - Altun Ha.

Malaria is the biggest disease killer in the world, and it's evolving all the time. Drugs which are effective against it change rapidly both with time and geographical location, to the extent that what works in one town may not work in the next. Or at any rate that's how it used to be. The variety I had, tertiary, gives a fever every three days, and between fevers you feel pretty normal. Blood samples have to be taken at the height of the fever to permit any meaningful diagnosis. I had three fevers before the medics got a grip on it. The fourth would have killed me, and in fact I only survived because I was by then in a well-equipped modern specialist hospital. My temperature in the last fever I had reached 111F, not that I knew anything about that or the previous one. I would take the risk of malaria extremely seriously. Because the bugs are evolving so fat, the only really effective preventative behaviour is to avoid being bitten.

Hep A is a most unpleasant illness, but not usually a killer. It is however a life sentence, and after it you view alcohol and high fat foods (notably nuts) with great wariness. I now cannot get drunk, and alcohol has little attraction for me as it just makes me feel ill. Sometimes extremely so - I have been hospitalised as a result of unwise fat or alcohol consumption. In practice it has a far greater effect on daily life than a history of malaria. You don't want this one either. And yes, I contracted Hep A in gamma-globulin days (1986). I did everything right and still contracted the illness.

There are other illnesses you shouldn't ignore. Whilst teaching underwater a few years back, wearing a shortie, I knelt on something - never knew what - whish stung me on a knee. Over succeeding weeks this became a nasty rash that then began to spread as a full-blown staph infection. This is one type of infection that is now almost immune to antibiotics, and it took three months of painful injections of five different antibiotics to kill it - or according to the doctor it would have killed me. Antibiotics have been so roundly abused that they have largely become ineffectual, so what used to be regarded as fairly trivial conditions have now again become very serious. For example, TB is now again killing otherwise healthy people in Britain. You need to avoid the possibility of any cuts or abrasions which may turn nasty.

I'm not a doctor so can only speak from my own experiences, observations and reading. But I have learned to be highly sceptical of any claims of a high degree of immunity to any condition. Everything I have ever caught I was "fully" immunised against.

I should add that almost all of the illnesses I had were contracted outside Belize. I don't see Belize as particularly high risk.

 

[DandyDon]

Thanks Peter. Your descriptions really reinforce my previous feelings, plus some add-ons...

Hep A & B are not common but it's such a good idea to get the two shots that can reduce one's risk of infection if exposed - for living in the US or for travel to countries that may have less controls. I think school kids here are required to get both along with several other vaccinations. A lot of us grew up before those requirements so it's good to consider the CDC suggestions. The more that do, with a majority immune, the less likely of outbreaks even among those who won't - like Dan above. Sbroh, the OP, already has his B for life.

For travel to countries that CDC recommends malaria prevention meds, Chloroquine is such an easy one to use if applicable to the area - and I believe it's still suggested for Belize. For other destinations requiring more extreme prophylactics, well - each to his/her own call. Still, spraying early & often with Deet or Picaridin (which also is known by other names) helps prevent malaria and dengue as well, the latter not having a vaccine. I generally keep a can of 40% Deet in my room and another in my dive locker, dive bag, or backpack.

Stick to the long wetsuits for protection, even tho dive shops like to sell shorties as they are easier to fit, but if even slightly injured - if it looks worse later, seek treatment ASAP. There are many bad bugs in the ocean. We lose gulf coast fishermen that way every year because they won't see a doc fast enough.

And in the unlikely event that one returns from an international trip and then gets sick, be sure the attending physicians know where you been...

 

[danvolker]

Saw this today.....just too relevant not to paste in here
Again..my point is NOT that there is no reason to ever take a vaccine...the issue is, you can't TRUST that you need any vaccine, without YOU , yourself, doing a great deal of homework first....You can NEVER trust the news, or the ADS on TV, or even the "solutions" chosen by the CDC. Also, your own doctor could be hoodwinked by the massive ad campaigns directed at all physicians, so again, YOU need to do your own research. The better your background in Biology, chemistry, and in reading science Journals, the more Darwin will favor you


Vaccine Caused Polio Becoming Very Serious Problem
By Dr. Mercola

Polio, a contagious disease caused by an intestinal virus, can cause difficulty breathing and paralysis as the virus attacks and kills motor nerve cells that control your muscles.
It can also cause death in its most severe form.
However, what is notoften shared is that in most cases polio is a mild illness, causing flu-like symptoms that disappear in two to 10 days.
Often, polio can occur and show no symptoms at all.
Even the Mayo Clinic statesⁱ:

“The vast majority of people who are infected with the polio virus don't become sick and are never aware they've been infected with polio.”
​

Vaccine-Caused Polio on the Rise

Another fact that may surprise you is that the vaccine itself is the source of newer cases of this disease.
At the same time that world health officials are declaring a victory on polio in India, they are calling a global meeting in Switzerland on the problem of vaccine-caused polio.
The problem is that while the oral vaccine has reined in wild polio, the wild virus is being replaced by vaccine-derived polio virus (VDPV), which causes acute flaccid paralysis.
(Health officials don’t call it polio because it isn’t “wild.&#8221
The international meeting, organized by the World Health Organization (WHO) in collaboration with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Japanese Ministry of Health, is scheduled for May 30-June 1, 2012, in Geneva, Switzerland.
According to polioeradication.comⁱⁱ:

“The meeting will review the available scientific information on VDPVs; discuss the scientific, policy and programmatic implications of continued VDPV emergence and transmission; and, help inform the ‘roadmap for VDPV elimination’ for the post-oral polio vaccine (OPV) era.”
​

Environmental surveillance for VDPV is now being conducted in a number of countries, including Australia, Egypt, Haiti, and Indonesia. In essence, this much-heralded vaccine strategy has replaced one infectious disease with another, more virulent strain... What kind of success is that, really?
While most affluent nations now rely on inactivated poliovirus vaccine (IPV), many third-world countries still use an oral polio vaccine as it’s less expensive and simpler to administer. However, the oral polio vaccine is made from a live polio virus, which carries a risk of causing polio. The virus in the vaccine can also mutate into a deadlier version, igniting new outbreaks. Genetic analysis has proven that such mutated viruses have caused at least seven separate outbreaks in Nigeria. Polio outbreaks in Haiti and the Dominican Republic in 2002 were also traced to a strain of oral polio vaccine (OPV) that mutated back to virulence.
According to a 2010 article in the New England Journal of Medicine, outbreaks of vaccine-derived polioviruses (VDPVs) have been occurring at a rate of once or twice per year, since the year 2000 ⁱⁱⁱ. The author, John F. Modlin, M.D., writes:

“The emergence of circulating VDPVs forces us to accept the reality that we are fighting fire with fire and that once eradication of WPV [wild polio virus] is assured, the use of live poliovirus vaccines will need to cease globally in a coordinated manner. Because cVDPVs will probably continue to circulate for at least 1 to 3 years after WPVs are eradicated, and live polioviruses may be reintroduced from rare immunodeficient persons who continue to excrete virus, the world will need to rely on inactivated poliovirus vaccine (IPV) indefinitely to maintain immunity.”
​

According to a 2004 report by Neil Z. Miller of the Global Vaccine Institute^iv, the live polio virus from the vaccine can remain in your throat for one to two weeks, and in your feces for up to two months. So not only is the vaccine recipient at risk, but he or she can potentially spread the disease as long as the virus remains in feces.
Fortunately, in the 1990’s parents of vaccine injured children lobbied to get the polio vaccine policy changed, and as a result of their efforts, the U.S. abandoned use of the live virus oral polio vaccine in 1999, in order to prevent individuals in America from being paralyzed by vaccine strain polio^v.
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The Polio Vaccine’s Cancer Link

You might be like me and be an American who received polio shots in the 1950's and 60's. I have not been, but many have ended up being informed—40 years later—that many of those experimental polio shots were contaminated with a monkey virus, simian virus 40 (SV40), that causes cancer in lab animals and has been linked to brain-, bone-, lung-, and lymphatic cancers in children and adults^vi,^vii.
They weren’t told the whole truth about polio vaccine risks, and vaccine makers and health officials are still frugal with the facts when it comes to vaccine risks. Many make blanket statements saying that “vaccines are safe,” when in fact such a statement simply cannot be made without misrepresenting the facts.
The truth is, vaccines are not safe for everyone and they clearly do not work for everyone. And even when they do work, you oftentimes end up with more virulent and hardy viruses...
In 2002, the journal Lancet^viiipublished compelling evidence that contaminated polio vaccine was responsible for up to half of the 55,000 non-Hodgkin's lymphoma cases that were occurring each year. Such statistics are never discussed when the success of a vaccine program is announced, yet it is a health outcome of the vaccine that should be taken into account.
The puzzle began in 1994, when Dr. Michele Carbone, a Loyola University researcher, found the virus SV40, which had never before been detected in humans, in half of the human lung tumors he was studying. Since then, 60 different lab studies have confirmed the results, and SV40 has been found in a variety of human cancers. At first no one could fathom how the virus had been transmitted into the human population, but according to the developer of Merck’s vaccine program, the late Dr. Maurice Hilleman, the virus was in fact unleashed via their polio vaccine.
According to the authors of The Virus and the Vaccine^ix, leading scientists and government officials turned their heads to repeated studies showing that the polio vaccine was contaminated with SV40, and even today some well-known agencies continue to dismiss study results. This is disconcerting, as the virus has even been detected in children too young to have received the contaminated vaccine administered in the 50’s and 60’s. There are suspicions that the monkey virus may have been in the polio vaccine up until as late as 1999^x. It is because of risks like this that Barbara Loe Fisher, founder of the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), has said:

“With mounting evidence that cross-species transfer of viruses can occur, the United States should no longer be using animal tissues to produce vaccines.”
​

How to Naturally Lower Your Risk of Contracting Polio

Did you know you can reduce your risk of contracting polio simply by cutting back on sugar? The evidence suggesting that a diet high in refined sugar (as well as other forms of fructose) increases your risk of contracting polio is discussed in the book Diet Prevents Polio, written by Benjamin P. Sandler, M.D. The book was published in 1951, at the height of the polio epidemic. In it, he writes:

“I reasoned that the polio virus was able to cross tissue barriers, reach the brain and spinal cord, invade the nerve cells, damage or destroy them and cause paralysis. And I further reasoned that if the blood sugar never fell below 80 mg polio could never result. I suspected that during a polio epidemic only those children and adults who experienced periods of low blood sugar would contract the disease and that those individuals who were in actual contact with the virus but who maintained normal blood sugar levels would not contract the disease.
... An experimental method to prove that low blood sugar was a factor of susceptibility to polio was readily available. In 1938, the only laboratory animal that could contract polio by experimental inoculation was the monkey. All other laboratory animals were completely resistant to the polio virus. The rabbit is one of these resistant animals.
Without knowing the blood sugar range in the monkey and rabbit, it was suspected that the blood sugar in the monkey reached lower levels than in the rabbit. These suspicions were found to have a basis in fact through the investigations of Drs. Jungeblut and Resnick of Columbia University who studied blood sugar levels in monkeys, and through the investigations of Drs. du Vigneaud and Karr of Cornell University who studied blood sugar levels in rabbits. In monkeys, blood sugar values as low as 50 mg. were observed, whereas in the rabbit, values below 100 mg. were never observed. In numerous determinations made on rabbits I have never obtained values below 100 mg.
It was therefore concluded that the susceptibility of the monkey to the polio virus was due to the fact that its blood sugar fell to subnormal values, and that the resistance of the rabbit might be associated with the fact that its blood sugar never fell below 100 mg, and that at this concentration cellular oxidation of glucose in the nervous system and other organs would be maintained at such a level as to enable the cells to protect themselves against invasion by the virus. Physiologists have stated that the normal blood sugar level of 80 mg holds true for all mammals.
The next step was to lower the blood sugar of the rabbit to subnormal values with insulin injections, and then inoculate the rabbit with polio virus. This was done and it was found that the rabbits became infected and developed the disease. The details of these experiments were published in the American Journal of Pathology, January, 1941.”
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According to another study, a substance produced during the sugar refining process, such as deoxysugars, may be responsible for polio. In general, it makes perfect sense that high sugar/fructose consumption could raise your risk of polio, as it, just like other infections, only tend to cause complications when your immune system is weakened, which can easily happen through poor nutrition (high fructose consumption), stress, and lack of sleep.
So, the polio vaccine is not the only, nor the ultimate solution to prevent this disease. Maintaining a strong and well-functioning immune system will always be your first line of defense, as this will reduce your risk of any number of diseases, including polio.
I urge you to do your homework before subjecting your children to any vaccine. The National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) is a top-notch source that provides well-referenced information on vaccines and infectious diseases. For a full list of precautions for children, teenagers and adults, read the manufacturer product inserts, and get more information about how to recognize a vaccine reaction at www.NVIC.org.
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[ from http://articles.mercola.com/sites/a...neffective.aspx?e_cid=20120502_DNL_artTest_B6 ]

 

[Hank49]

For travel to countries that CDC recommends malaria prevention meds, Chloroquine is such an easy one to use if applicable to the area - and I believe it's still suggested for Belize..

for what it's worth, the locals here say the malaria mosquitos are in the mountains, not along the sea.
If it was prevalent along the coast, I would have had it a dozen times by now. When mosquitos come out (after rains or during their cycle) I get bit.....50 times or more per day. I'm not going to put Off or anything on here every day. It makes me feel really hot....I believe having the same effect as putting a thick coat of paint on the radiator of your car.