I am working w/an AD USAF (Security Forces) member. He & his wife have two healthy children born prior to entry on AD. Over the past 2 yrs they have had 2 miscarriages/stillborn deaths. Doctors have no idea why, both babies were healthy & showed no distress.

The only differences have been his 3 tours to Iraq (Bagdad 2 & Kirkuk 1)& he has completed the Anthrax shot regimen. Neither smoke, drink or use drugs.

I think you see where I'm going w/this. Since we had problems w/AO & Viet Vet children why not the possibility w/Anthrax.

Have any of you read or heard of any other incidences like this. Any studies? Any suggestions? tfw

The Institute of Medicine looked into all studies on real and alleged complications related to the anthrax vaccine just a few years ago. You can review the findings, and the studies reviewed, at www.iom.edu Look for the link to their published findings.

Short version: no substantiated link was ever found between miscarriages, stillbirths or birth defects and administration of anthrax vaccine. Remember, the vaccine has been given to scientists, researchers and livestock workers for about 40 years, so there is quite a history of long-term follow-up on the vaccine.

With 3 tours in Iraq, there are plenty of possible environmental exposures that are more likely to be connected ... or it could be an exposure on the part of the mother that results in the miscarriages/stillbirths.

Most miscarriages are Nature's/God's way of correcting mistakes ... a hard way to put it, perhaps, but in almost all cases miscarriages are because the fetus has a fatal developmental flaw that is incompatible with life. (Miscarriages are defined as spontaneous loss of pregnancy in the first trimester.) Stillbirths are usually the result of a problem with the uterus, placenta, cord, illness in the mother or, as with miscarriages, a flaw that is incompatible with life that doesn't manifest itself until later in pregnancy.

Experiencing either miscarriage or stillbirth is devastating. Not having answers just makes it worse, but sometimes that's just the way it is, unfortunately. We don't know everything.

Cider33Alpha: Your response is appreciated. Thank you for your time. tfw

The old anthrax vaccine did not contain the adjuvant squalene. This poison they are using to experiment on our service people can be deadly or cause many serious illness's. Women are report more pre-cancerous pap-smear results than ever before. There is a high rate of birth defects from moms who have had the anthrax shot. Need more info? visit the yahoo group Anthrax No or protectingourgaurdians.org

Gary Matsumoto, a journalist based in New York City, has reported from thirty-two different countries on five continents, covered two wars and five popular uprisings, and won ten journalism awards. He has been the London Bureau Manager and Chief Foreign Correspondent for NBC Radio News; a National Correspondent for NBC's Weekend Today Show and Senior Correspondent for the Fox News Channel. As a broadcaster, he has covered events ranging from the toppling of the Communist Party in Eastern Europe to Desert Storm, the Tiananmen Square massacre to the death of Princess Diana. He has written about the anthrax letter attacks for the Washington Post and Science magazine. His 1998 article in Vanity Fair was the first to draw the connection between the anthrax vaccine and Gulf War Syndrome.

The Greatest Story Never Told

For the past 17 years, the Army has been working on a new anthrax vaccine that contains no anthrax, and is made with an ingredient that it does not want to name. That ingredient is called squalene. Squalene is an oil. Without it, the new vaccine will not work any better than the old one. In fact, for all intents and purposes, without squalene the new vaccine is the old one. What makes squalene so important is its proven ability to stimulate a strong response from the immune system. That is something the main ingredient of the new vaccine, the now ultra-purified protein secreted by the anthrax microbe—recombinant protective antigen—cannot do by itself. It is too weak.

Immunologists have a special name for substances used to boost feeble vaccines. They are called adjuvants. Adjuvants are arguably the most extensively researched pharmaceutical product in the last quarter century that you never heard of. I have used the word adjuvant three times in this paragraph so far and that is probably three times more than you have ever seen it in print before. This is partly because the most effective adjuvants, those formulated with oils, are too dangerous for human use. That is squalene's other proven ability, causing incurable disease, which is why it is such a touchy subject with the Department of Defense.

The word adjuvant comes from a Latin word that means "to help." But with oil adjuvants like squalene that term is misleading. Today, only one adjuvant—an aluminum salt called alum—is licensed for human use. All the oil adjuvants are so noxious that their use is restricted to experiments with animals, and even then, governments have written strict regulations to govern how they are used. The classic oil adjuvant, called Freund's Complete Adjuvant, is considered too inhumane to even inject into animals. It does a terrific job of stimulating the immune system, though. Unfortunately, Freund's Complete Adjuvant can cause permanent organ damage and incurable disease. As early as the 1930s, these oil additives were notorious for inducing illness. By the 1950s, scientists knew these illnesses were specifically autoimmune. Today that is their chief use in research—inducing disease instead of preventing it. Scientists studying autoimmune disease cannot wait around for its spontaneous appearance in a lab animal; they inject it with Freund's Complete Adjuvant to reproduce autoimmunity on demand. Oil adjuvants made with squalene equally effective at this job, and regrettably according to Dutch scientists, equally inhumane. , ,

Autoimmune diseases are chronic and progressively debilitating ailments; some, like multiple sclerosis and lupus, can be fatal. They occur when the immune system loses its ability to distinguish what is "self" from what is foreign. Under normal circumstances, your immune system ignores the constituents of your own body; immunologists call this "tolerance." But if tolerance is broken, the immune system turns relentlessly self-destructive, attacking the body it is supposed to defend.

Adjuvants can break tolerance. In 1956, Dr. Jules Freund, the Hungarian born scientist who gave his name to the adjuvant he created, warned that animals injected with Freund's developed terrible conditions: allergic aspermatogenesis (stoppage of sperm production), experimental allergic encephalomyelitis (the animal version of multiple sclerosis) and allergic neuritis (inflammation of nerves that can lead to paralysis), allergic uveitis (an inflammation in the eye that can cause blindness). There was no reversing any of these conditions.

Scientists are still unsure why oil adjuvants do this. One theory is that oils have the ability to hyperactivate the immune system. "The cause is probably that when injecting these molecules, you create a chaos in the immune system," says Dr. Johnny C. Lorentzen, and immunologist with the Karolinska Institute, which awards the annual Nobel Prize for Medicine. He says these oils induce "an extremely powerful response," so powerful, in fact, that the immune system goes haywire and starts attacking things it would otherwise leave alone. Another possibility, which has not been explored very much, is that this harmful phenomenon actually has something to do with one of the greatest distinguishing characteristics of the immune system—its specificity. Over eons in time, this extraordinarily elegant and powerful system has evolved to respond very precisely to what it deems potentially harmful to the body. Our bodies contain all sorts of oily molecules. It could be that when an oil is injected, the immune system actually responds to it with a high degree of precision - just as it responds to everything else - but because the adjuvant resembles too closely those oils found in the body, the immune system begins attacking those too. In immunology this is called a "cross reaction." Neither proposition - chaos or specificity - has been proven so far. But however oils do their damage, it is well known that they do.

Army scientists have been as aware as anyone else of the harm that injecting oils can do. The problem for military personnel is that these scientists learned this lesson by injecting oils into troops in experiments that in some cases they did not agree to participate in. The central question in this book is whether such an experiment has been done again with the new anthrax vaccine and squalene.

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Correction!

The older anthrax vaccines DID contain higher quantities of squalene than the present version (Biothrax) - though NO version exceeded safety standards.

It is impossible to eliminate all squalene from any biological compound since it is a naturally-occuring product. In fact, our livers PRODUCE squalene.

If you want to attack the anthrax vaccine, choose another, more recent and scientifically valid reason to do so.

Matsumoto? Writes well. Scientifically accurate? Not so much.

Thanks Cider you are the one!

Bumping this so it doesn't get purged. If it is, sure enough - a week later, some will ask the same question!

Hi Cider, sounds like you're also medcorp

I wonder if anyone looked at the possibility of genetic problems with these babies? As you say, miscarriage is a natural process that occurs for good reason, but it is still unusual for a couple to have two healthy followed by three miscarried/etc. Other environmental problems than a vaccination reaction may have occurred, but the pattern suggests to me that a genetic screen might be a good idea too. I cannot recall which off the top of my head, but I believe there are several genetic conditions which can produce a 1 in 3 or 1 in 4 healthy baby situation dependng entirely on which set of genetic info end up in the sperm and egg after meiosis.

I can't find fault with that suggestion, Prismatic - other than, perhaps, the expense of genetic testing, that is not usually covered by insurance.

Please read my post..."Please read this and forward it could save a life". It may be helpful

Actually women can have a miscarriage more often than realized. They could be getting what they think is a usual cycle but is really a miscarriage. They can happen after giving birth to healthy children just as easily as it can happen before going full term. There is numerous factors that can be involved with the reason for the miscarriage.

I know of several ladies who have had numerous ones before finally carrying full term or after they have given birth to 1 or 2 even 3 children.

Dh was in PGW the 1st time, has had anthrax shots along with everything else, was on submarines and we lived in housing that still had lead paint. I miscarried between child #1 and #2 but it had nothing to do with any of the above, it had to due with something that I got when I was 20. It can be stress because I am sure she as a mother & wife is more stressed now with everything going on than before. Sometimes though it has to do with genetics or it can have something to do with something that did happen in your past.

Or, as a recently-published study suggests, it may have to do with caffeine. Women who drink more than about two coffee cups' worth of caffeine per day are twice as likely to miscarry - prompting some OB/GYNs to advise their pregnant patients to give up coffee, tea and sodas (unless decaf) along with tobacco and alcohol for the duration of the pregnancy and while breast-feeding.

quote:

Originally posted by Cider33Alpha:
Or, as a recently-published study suggests, it may have to do with caffeine. Women who drink more than about two coffee cups' worth of caffeine per day are twice as likely to miscarry - prompting some OB/GYNs to advise their pregnant patients to give up coffee, tea and sodas (unless decaf) along with tobacco and alcohol for the duration of the pregnancy and while breast-feeding.

That isn't new, it has been around for years. But it really depends on your doctor. Some say yes you can but make sure it is in moderation because it is sometimes worse to totally give everything up. It wasn't 2 cups I believe it was like 5 a day. I was allowed to drink 1 Diet Coke a day, occasional glass of wine and then moderate everything else. I know someone who followed the book, never had any caffeine, no chocolate, etc.. and their child was quite sick and at 2 got diagnosed with Diabetes. So just because you follow the rules doesn't mean that your child won't be born with any problems. That child's fate as our pastor told us was already mapped out when it was conceived.

Very true - despite precautions, bad things still can and do happen.