Tetanus

“Tetanus is an infection caused by bacteria called Clostridium tetani. When the bacteria invade the body, they produce a poison (toxin) that causes painful muscle contractions. Another name for tetanus is “lockjaw”. It often causes a person’s neck and jaw muscles to lock, making it hard to open the mouth or swallow. CDC recommends vaccines for infants, children, teens, and adults to prevent tetanus.” -CDC

I would like to add that clostridium tetani is found mostly in and around feces by certain animals, namely, cows and horses. Even with the large amount of farms here in America, it is still an extremely rare occurrence. If you get cut with something that has been dipped in cow dung, there’s a less than 5% chance you’ll get tetanus, if you do contract it, there’s a 90% chance you’ll fight it off with no problem. “Even so, if you ever get a wound while traipsing barefoot through the barbwire no man’s land of World War 1, you can put some betadine or peroxide on it and the tetanus bacteria will die a painless death.” -Forrest Maready

Tetanus does not effect you when it’s outside of the body. It is happiest in dead tissue, and it is anaerobic (will not hurt you in the presence of oxygen). In fact, the poison that causes tetanospasmin (the neurotoxin that causes the clinical manifestations of tetanus), is not produced unless there is an absence of oxygen. So if you treat your wound properly, and let it heal from the inside out, there is virtually zero danger of you contracting tetanus. This is where the myth that it is found on rusty nails comes from. It has nothing to do with rust, but puncture wounds can be problematic because they’re hard to clean properly. [1] (I would just like to point out that this CDC document states that, “efficacy of the toxoid has never been studied in a vaccine trial.”)

But if you’re not confident in betadine or peroxide, there is always vitamin c which has been published in peer reviewed literature as very effective in the treatment of multiple diseases, including tetanus. [2] And if you’re still not confident in that, there is tetanus immune globulin which might help, and certainly has a better chance of working than the vaccine, which takes 2-3 weeks to create antibodies, and the incubation period for tetanus is approximately 8 days. [1] Are you wondering why, if this is the case, for anyone to see right on the CDC website, it is still common practice to offer the “tetanus vaccine” (actually the DTaP) when you go in to the ER with a cut? Why you have to ask for the immune globulin instead of the vaccine if you want it? These are good questions…but don’t expect good answers.

I want to stress particularly, that infants in the US are at zero risk for tetanus. Babies are at risk for tetanus in the same places where animal dung or mud is used to pack umbilical cords (like Ethiopia), where the umbilical cord is cut with instruments that haven’t been properly sterilized, and used to be a problem here when doctors refused to wash their hands between handling dead patients in the morgue and going up to do an invasive exam on a laboring woman in a different part of the hospital. In fact, back when tetanus was slightly more common than it is now (the numbers have never been very high), these are the events that caused the most tetanus: circumcision, medical dressings and sanitary towels found contaminated with tetanus, abortion, hysterectomy, and childbirth. [3] (if you would like a horrifying peak into the history of medicine, look up the story of Semelweiss and what puerperal fever is).

I will touch on the recent case of an unvaccinated child contracting tetanus from a wound on a farm in Oregon recently, simply because I do not want to pretend it doesn’t happen, or maybe just to be perfectly honest. His wound was treated and stitched at home, and 6 days later he showed the first signs of laryngospasm and had difficulty breathing. After 65 days in the hospital and a huge medical bill, he was sent home fully recovered and still unvaccinated (that’s some dedicated parents, if you ask me). But it was the first pediatric case of tetanus in 30 years! That’s got to be encouraging, right? And I have to wonder how the wound was treated before the stitching happened (since it was done at home, which might not be the best idea), and was he treated with vitamin c? And if not, would he have recovered much faster with it? I’m not denying it’s a scary poison if it were to happen…but one in 30 years for that entire state has got to be really small odds. [4]

You have to contrast this reaction from the media because the child was unvaccinated (it was literally all over, even the NY Times covered it), and stories of vaccinated children getting tetanus and their doctors refusing to even consider that it might be tetanus because they’ve been vaccinated. It’s rare, but sometimes they admit it. Here are three examples from pubmed:

“We report a case of generalised tetanus in a 22-year-old woman that arose despite the protective antitoxin antibody in her serum. The patient received all her vaccinations in the USA; her last vaccination was 6 years ago.” [5]

“Severe (grade III) tetanus occurred in three immunized patients who had high serum levels of anti-tetanus antibody. The disease was fatal in one patient. One patient had been hyperimmunized to produce commercial tetanus immune globulin. Two patients had received immunizations 1 year before presentation.” [6]

“Five children aged five to 15 years contracted tetanus in Finland between 1969 and 1985, together with 101 adults. Four of the five had been adequately immunized against tetanus.” [7]

I’ve already gone over the main points of the vaccine (the DTaP) here, but I would like to add a little bit and tell you how it’s made.

Remember I said tetanus is happiest when in dead tissue without oxygen? Well, to mass produce a toxin like they must to mass produce a vaccine, they have to mass produce the bacteria that causes this toxin. So they take a beef heart and combine it with pancreas from another animal to break it down and put them in a petri dish to grow. So the meat is rotting, and the bacteria is kept alive with albumin from cow blood. Then they take the toxin and they have to deactivate it so that it doesn’t kill you, and they do that with formaldehyde. And then the toxoid is so weak your immune system wouldn’t even react to it, so they add a good dose of aluminum to create inflammation so your immune system is jolted into action and starts looking for the culprit and then hopefully creates antibodies to tetanus. And you assume that once they’re done with this process, they purify it to the Nth degree, but no. This paper I will cite from 2014 states that not only is there a lot of variability from batch to batch, but it contains proteins from the culture medium, from bacteria, and from the degradation products (rotten meat). [8]

So, according to HHS, “It’s very rare, but the DTaP vaccine can cause the following symptoms in children:

Seizures (about 1 child in 14,000)
Non-stop crying, for 3 hours or more (up to about 1 child in 1,000)
High fever, over 105°F (about 1 child in 16,000) [9]

To be honest, I don’t trust these numbers as far as I can throw them (they’re even lower than VAERS, so I don’t know what magic hat they drew them out of), but let’s take them at face value. If there are around 4 million babies born each year in the US (3.8 million babies in 2018), that makes those numbers turn into 285 children experiencing seizures every year, 4,000 children experiencing non-stop crying, for 3 hours or more (I just have to comment on this. People pass this off as not a big deal, but HOW?? When my baby cries for 10 minutes straight–Lucas has done this like once in his life–I feel like I’m dying inside. How do people deal with 3+ hours of non-stop crying? And if you don’t think this is dangerous, the high-pitched, non-stop crying has been shown to be a sign of encephalopathy (brain swelling), so if you think it’s normal for a baby to cry for 3 hours straight, your definition of normal needs work), and 250 children per year getting a fever of 105 and more. And don’t forget that this is the vaccine you get like 278 doses of. 😛

With all this, the fact that efficacy is based on assumptions and correlation instead of actual evidence, the difference in tetanus cases in World War 1 and 2 being where most of the “proof” comes from (not taking into account the changes in healthcare, the fact that horses were the only mode of transportation in the first world war, and we had cars by the second, and multiple other major differences that could also have played a role in less tetanus), and the fact that even when you do have antibodies, you can obviously still get it, and the fact that there are thousands of parents blaming this particular vaccine for their child’s sudden unexplained death (there are estimated to be 3,500 deaths by SIDS per year,[10] most of them happening between 2-4 months, all a great mystery to doctors and health officials across the world despite being able to pinpoint the cause of death for almost everything else, even in Egyptian mummies)…and knowing without doubt that babies don’t just cry endlessly when they’re healthy and aren’t in pain from their brain swelling or some other ailment, and they for sure don’t just drop dead for no reason… I would need some major convincing to take this risk (5+ times per child). Actually, I don’t think there’s any convincing that would be enough. I hate to be close minded, but after as much reading and research as I’ve done, I think I can close the book on this particular vaccine.

If you’re planning to get this vaccine because you’re still afraid of tetanus, or just want more information out of curiosity, please watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIgomZ06FFQ

Informed Health

Tetanus

Leave a comment Cancel reply

Share this:

Related

Leave a comment Cancel reply