Doctors in western Texas see patients with measles whose diseases have complicated by an alternative treatment approved by skeptic of vaccines, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Health Secretary.
Parents in the Gaines County, Texas, the center of a strong measles epidemic, have increasingly turned into supplements and unstable treatments for the protection of their children, many of whom are not vaccinated against the virus.
One of these supplements is the garden liver oil containing vitamin A, which Mr Kennedy is promoted as an almost miraculous measles treatment. Doctors at Covenant Children’s Hospital in Lubbock, Texas, say they have now faced a handful of non -vaccinated children given so much vitamin A that they had signs of liver damage.
Some of them had received unsafe doses of the liver liver and other vitamin A supplements for several weeks in an attempt to prevent measles infection, Dr. Summer Davies, who cares about children with acute sick children in the hospital.
“I had a patient who was sick for only a few days, four or five days, but took it for three weeks,” Dr. Davies said.
While doctors sometimes administer high doses of vitamin A in a hospital to manage severe measles, experts do not recommend taking a doctor without supervision. Vitamin A is not an effective way to prevent measles. However, two doses of measles, mumps and red vaccine are about 97 % effective.
In high doses, vitamin A can cause liver damage. Dry, peeling the skin. hair loss; And, in rare cases, seizures and coma. So far, doctors in Western Texas hospitals said they have seen patients with yellow skin and high levels of liver enzymes in their blood, both signs of a damaged liver.
Many of these patients were in the hospital for severe measles infection. Doctors discovered liver damage only after routine laboratory work.
On Tuesday, the epidemic, which began in January, had spread to more than 320 people in Texas. Forty patients have been hospitalized and a child has died.
In the neighboring counties of New Mexico, the virus has become ill 43 and was hospitalized. Seven confirmed cases in Oklahoma have also been linked to the epidemic.
Local doctors and health employees are increasingly concerned about the growing popularity of unproved corrective measures to prevent and treat measles, which they fear that they are delaying people delaying critical medical treatment and rejecting the prevention of vaccine.
In Gaines County, alternative medicine has always been popular. Many in the large Mennonite community in the area, where most cases have gathered, avoid interacting with the medical system and maintaining a long tradition of natural therapies.
Health officials said the recent popularity of using vetamine for measles could be detected back in a Fox News interview with Mr Kennedy, in which he had heard of “almost miraculous and instant recovery” with the remedies such as the cure, such as the cure.
In an opinion on The Washington Post on Tuesday afternoon, Kevin Griffis, who was until last week the communications manager at the Disease Control and Prevention Centers, wrote that he had resigned in part because of Mr Kennedy’s handling of the outburst.
“In my last weeks at CDC, I watched that infectious career experts were in charge of spending hours in search of medical literature in vain for data to support Kennedy’s preferred treatments,” Mr. Griffis wrote.
In the weeks after Fox News interview, west Texas pharmacies struggled to keep vitamin A and liver liver supplements on their shelves. “I didn’t hear anything about vitamin A until he said it on television,” said Katherine Wells, director of Lubbock.
A local doctor – whom Mr. Kennedy was named in the Fox News interview as one of the doctors who told him “what is working on the spot” – opened an improvised clinic in Gaines County and began to eliminate various treatments, including Vitamin A supplements, for the treatment of active measures.
Dr. Davies said he suspected that the majority of the children he had encountered had taken vitamin A supplements at home.
Experts say that vitamin A can play an important role in the “supportive care” provided by doctors to patients with severe measles infections.
It operates with the replenishment of body stores exhausted by the virus, which strengthens the immune system, said Dr. William Schaffner, a specialist infectious disease at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center.
In the hospital, doctors give only two doses of vitamin to children with measles, usually during two days, and “very carefully calibrate” the amounts depending on age and weight, he said.
Dr. Schaffner stressed that it is not a miraculous treatment for the virus and that there is no antiviral medication for measles. And there is no reliable evidence that vitamin A helps prevent infection in children in the United States, where vitamin A deficiencies are extremely rare.
In fact, giving children repetitive, high doses of vitamin are dangerous. Unlike other vitamins, which are rinsed by the body through urine, excessive vitamin A accumulates in adipose tissue, making it more likely to reach dangerous levels over time.
“This kind of precautionary use I think is especially concerned,” said Dr. Lara Johnson, another doctor at Lubbock Hospital.
“When we have children take it for weeks and weeks, then you may have a cumulative effect of toxicity;”He added.
Dr. Johnson added that local doctors were particularly concerned about parents-based supplements without prescription-which labels do not always accurately reflect the amount of vitamin they contain-and the acceptance of dosage recommendations from non-verified sources.
