The doctors in western Texas are seeing patients with measles whose diseases have been complicated by an alternative therapy approved by the skeptical vaccines including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., secretary of health.
Parents in the County of Gaines, Texas, the center of a stormy measles epidemic, have increasingly transformed into supplements and not demonstrated treatments to protect their children, many of whom are not vaccinated, against the virus.
One of these supplements is vitamin A, which Mr. Kennedy has promoted an almost miraculous cure for measles. The doctors of the Covenant Children’s Hospital of Lubbock, in Texas, say they have now treated a handful of children to whom so much vitamin A has been given to have signs of liver damage.
Some of them had received non -safe doses of supplements for several weeks in an attempt to prevent a measles infection, said dr. Summer Davies, who takes care of seriously sick children in the hospital.
“I had a patient who was sick only a couple of days, four or five days, but I had taken it for three weeks,” said Dr. Davies.
While doctors sometimes administer high doses of vitamin A in the hospital to manage serious measles, experts do not recommend taking it without supervision of the doctor. Vitamin A is not an effective way to prevent measles; However, two doses of measles, parotitis and the rosolia vaccine are about 97 %effective.
At high doses, vitamin A can cause liver damage; dry and peeled skin; hair loss; And, in rare cases, convulsions and coma. So far, the doctors of the Hospitals of Western Texas have claimed to have seen patients with yellowed skin and high levels of liver enzymes in their blood tasks, both signs of damaged liver.
Many of these patients had been in hospital for a serious measles infection; Doctors discovered liver damage only after laboratory routine work.
Starting from Tuesday, the epidemic, which began in January, had spread to more than 320 people in Texas. Forty patients were hospitalized and a child died.
In the nearby counties of New Mexico, the virus fell ill 43 and hospitalized two. Seven cases confirmed in Oklahoma were also connected to the epidemic.
The doctors and local health officials have increasingly worried about the growing popularity of the remedies not demonstrated to prevent and take care of measles, who fear that people delay critical medical care and reject vaccination, the only way shown to prevent a morbid infection.
In Gaines county, alternative medicine has always been popular. Many in the large Mennonita community of the area, where most cases have been grouped, avoid interacting with the medical system and adhere to a long tradition of natural remedies.
Health officials have stated that the recent popularity of vitamin use for measles could be traced back to a Fox News interview with Mr. Kennedy, in which he said he heard of “almost miraculous and instantaneous recovery” with treatments such as cod liver oil, who said “the safest application of vitamin A.”
In a washington post essay on Tuesday afternoon, Kevin Griffis, who until last week was the director of communications of the centers for the control and prevention of diseases, wrote that he had partially resigned due to the management of the epidemic by Mr. Kennedy.
“In my last few weeks on the CDC, I have seen while career experts have commissioned to spend precious hours looking for a medical literature for data in vain to support Kennedy’s favorite treatments,” wrote Griffis.
In the weeks following the Fox News interview, pharmacies in western Texas have struggled to maintain liver oil supplements of vitamin A and cod on their shelves. “I didn’t hear anything about vitamin A until he said it on television,” said Katherine Wells, director of Lubbock’s public health.
A local doctor – that Mr. Kennedy has appointed in the Fox News interview as one of the doctors who had told him “what is working on the ground” – has opened an improvised clinic in the County of Gaines and has started to distribute various treatments, including vitamin A supplements, to treat the active cases of the disease and to prevent infection.
Dr. Davies said she suspects that the majority of children he had taken care of had taken vitamin suppliers at home.
Experts say that vitamin A can play an important role in the “support care” that doctors provide patients with serious measles infections.
It works by reinstating the body warehouses impoverished by the virus, which strengthens the immune system, said dr. William Schaffner, infectious diseases specialist at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center.
In the hospital, doctors only give two doses of vitamin to children with measles, usually over the course of two days and “calibrate with great attention” the quantities depending on age and weight, he said.
Dr. Schaffner stressed that it is not a miraculous treatment for the virus and that there are no antiviral drugs for measles. And there is no credible evidence that vitamin to help to prevent infection in children in the United States, where vitamin A deficiencies are extremely rare.
In fact, giving repeated children, high doses of vitamin are dangerous. Unlike other vitamins, which are eliminated from the body through urine, the excess of vitamin A accumulates in the adipose tissue, making it more likely that they reach dangerous levels over time.
“That type of preventive use that I think is particularly worrying,” said Dr. Lara Johnson, another doctor at Lubbock hospital.
“When we have children who take it for weeks and weeks, then you potentially have a cumulative impact of toxicity,“He added.
Dr. Johnson added that local doctors were particularly worried about the fact that parents are based on desktop supplements to which labels do not always carefully reflect the quantity of vitamin that contain and accepting dosage recommendations from un verageted sources.