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Home › Articles › General Health › Aluminum in Vaccines

Aluminum in Vaccines

Is This Something to Worry About?

By Lisa A. Goldstein

Pages:  1  2  3  

Dr. Bob Sears, part of the Sears Family of Pediatricians and author of The Vaccine Book: Making the Right Decision for Your Child (Little, Brown & Company, 2007), claims to have started the aluminum "rumor," and believes that it isn't completely free of harm.

"The FDA has determined that babies should not get more than about 25 to 50 micrograms of aluminum in any one day," Dr. Sears says. "If too much aluminum is injected all at once, it can find its way into the brain, bones and body organs and cause damage. This was discovered many years ago in hospitalized patients who were receiving IV solutions containing too much aluminum. That's why the FDA put a limit on it."

Aluminum is added to six of the routine childhood vaccines to help them work better, Dr. Sears says. Getting more than one of these vaccines at a time far exceeds the FDA's safety limit on aluminum. On the current vaccine schedule, babies get four of these vaccines simultaneously at 2, 4 and 6 months of age.

Why this discrepancy between the FDA's policy and what is allowed into the vaccines? asks Dr. Sears. "First, without aluminum, the vaccines won't work very well," he says. "So we can't just take it out. We'd need to reformulate the entire vaccine manufacturing process. Second, many years ago when the aluminum problem was discovered, babies weren't getting so many vaccines all at once. But now that so many more shots have been added to the infant schedule, I think that this issue has simply been overlooked."

A 2002 article published in ScienceDirect by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry looked into the aluminum risk. The abstract says: "Some vaccines contain aluminum adjuvants to enhance the immunological response, and it has been postulated that this aluminum could contribute to adverse health effects, especially in children who receive a vaccination series starting at birth." It later concludes, "The calculated body burden of aluminum from vaccinations exceeds that from dietary sources; however, it is below the minimal risk level equivalent curve after the brief period following injection."


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