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       I feel compelled to comment on a small item in The Tribune (Nov. 16) headlined "Hepatitis B vaccines needed for children."  It goes on to say that a course of 3 shots is required for all students enrolled in the 7th grade after September 1, 2000.  The same series of shots, which have to be administered within a six-month period, is also required for children entering kindergarten.

       Hepatitis B is not particularly contagious.  According to the Centers for Disease Control, it is essentially an adult disease transmitted through body fluids, primarily blood.    It occurs in high risk populations such as drug addicts who share needles, the sexually promiscuous, health care workers likely to be exposed to blood, and people who need blood transfusions, risks that do not apply to more than a miniscule number of kindergartners or even 7th graders.

       Despite the fact that only babies born to infected mothers are at risk,  the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) decreed until July 7 that all newborn infants must receive their first Hep B shot within 12 hours of birth.  One must question the wisdom of inoculating every newborn with a problematical vaccine when a simple blood test could have screened pregnant women for the disease.

        The incidence of Hepatitis B in the United States is very low, 0.1% to 0.5%, and occurs primarily in adults aged 20 to 39.  According to the Guide to Clinical Preventive Services,  "The number of cases peaked in 1985 and has shown a continuous gradual decline since that time."  Still, the CDC and the AAP recommended that every newborn child receive a shot at birth without knowing how it would affect individual infants whose immune and nervous systems can be at different stages of development.

        The result: more babies were dying from the vaccine than the disease.  Thanks to the persistence of bereaved parents and organizations like the National Vaccine Information Center, who confronted the agencies with figures, and heartbreaking case histories, the requirement for administering Hep B vaccine to newborns was withdrawn last July.

        The authority to mandate vaccinations lies with individual states.  To steer them in the direction of what it considers correct decisions,  the Department of Health and Human Services has provided states with funds to set up a tracking program tied to social security numbers in order to make sure that every child is vaccinated as it recommends.  States have even been paid a bounty for every fully-vaccinated  child.  Being "fully vaccinated" requires 33 or 34 shots of 9 or 10 different vaccines, including,  Hep B. Additional tracking funds were provided by vaccine manufacturers who would recoup this expense from vaccine sales, which amounted to $1 billion for Merck in 1997.

       The Food and Drug Administration approved genetically-engineered HepB vaccines by Merck and SmithKline Beecham on the basis of studies in which children were monitored for only four or five days following their vaccination. The Merck study involved only 653 children up to 10 years old and found that 17% of them experienced weakness, headache, fever and joint pain. Except for fever, these symptoms would not be obvious in a newborn.

      A 1994 report by the National Academy of Sciences criticized the studies as being too small and too short to detect delayed adverse reactions.  It also said that repeated reports of Guillain-Barre syndrome, arthritis, transverse myelitis, multiple sclerosis and other central demyelinating diseases, optic neuritis, and sudden infant death syndrome following Hep B vaccinations had not been adequately investigated.  A New Zealand study of 100,000 children, on the other hand, found a 64% increase in Type 1 (juvenile) diabetes in children who had received the vaccine compared with those who had not.  This finding followed a massive campaign to administer Hep B vaccine to infants six weeks of age.

       The U.S. government Vaccine Adverse Reporting System has received 16,000 reports of hospitalizations, injuries and deaths attributed to Hep B vaccinations.  It is estimated that only 10% of adverse reactions are reported, however

            Most of us have a tendency to believe that government health agencies operate in our best interests, but I doubt that the victims of Gulf War syndrome who, in addition to a cocktail of vaccines and exposure to noxious elements, were forced to take a drug (pyridostigmine bromide) which made them sick - some permanently so.  They were  not given Doxycycline, a drug that helped a lucky few to overcome their adverse reactions. Instead, they were accused of malingering or told that their illness was psychosomatic.

       Another case is the troops deliberately and needlessly exposed to the fallout from nuclear test bombs, to say nothing of residents downwind of the test areas and the hospitalized civilians deliberately injected with plutonium at Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester NY to see how it would affect them.  There was also the cover-up of cancers among the US navy's nuclear submariners. 

       Worst of all, was the U.S. Public Health Service's Tuskegee syphilis study in which 400 poor Afro-American sharecroppers with the disease were not treated so that researchers could study  the progression of the disease, which was already well-documented. Moneim A. Fadali,. M.D., Commissioner, Medical State Board of California and a list of honors too numerous to mention,  described it in his book Animal Experimentation a Harvest of Shame:  "The stages of the disease were observed by the so-called scientists and physicians from the initial chancre, to the rash, to the arthritis, to the destruction of the nervous system, heart valves and major blood vessels, all despite the well-known fact that if not treated, syphilis is fatal;  all regardless of the discovery of penicillin and its proved efficacy in the treatment of syphilis."

       The history of such government agency crimes and cover-ups suggests that we should all be more inclined to think for ourselves and ask questions before  meekly subjecting ourselves and our children to every government recommendation.