In this recording with Aaron from Raglan Radio and Erin Hudson discuss the topic of natural immunity and touch on what you can expect in the Authentic Resistance course. They chat over chicken pox, the power of breast milk and how parents don’t need to be afraid of fevers.

In the interview
1.02 Who the Authentic Resistance course is for
2.09 How does the Health and Disability Commissioner Act apply to informed consent
2.37 Have vaccines always been well received
3.44 What are the five diseases that concern most parents
4.33 Why the increase in childhood vaccines
4.50 Why are our elderly at risk of Shingles
6.56 Are unvaccinated kids healthier
10.00 Can breast milk provide immunity for children
14.14 Why do we vaccinate children at six weeks
14.38 Do parents have to vaccinate in time with the Health Department schedule
15.34 Are there alternatives to vaccines
16.52 What are adjuvants
17.45 The keys to managing childhood fevers

Good Morning Aaron.

Arron: Folks, Erin is going to be here on Saturday, May 20, which is real soon, with a Natural Immunity Course and, is it just you running it or are there other people involved?

Erin: There are two of us running it, Aaron. Myself and another woman whose name is Sheena Roberts, and Sheena, for a very long time in part of her career, was a vaccinator.

Her job was to go and help vaccinate people with a flu shot, and my role over the years has been as a naturopath. So the two of us together have combined our skills and also our knowledge to promote this course.

Arron: Okay, so it’s natural immunity, building up the system’s natural immunity. How does that relate to vaccination?

Are you saying that you don’t need to worry about vaccinations because you are going to build up your own immunity?

What’s the story there?

Erin: So who this course is for is for the family or the parent who is undecided about whether or not they are going to choose all the vaccines on our vaccine schedule.

I’m not sure whether you know very much, or your listeners know very much about the schedule, but some of the vaccines on it are optional.

In fact, all of them are optional.

Arron: Okay.

Erin: So there might be someone who decides they don’t want to have, for example, the tetanus shot, but they also would like to know how they could look after their family and their child without having to use something from the doctor.

They can use their own immunity, they can have their body work for itself, and they can also, of course, make use of, if the baby is young, breast milk.

Arron: Okay. Just before we get into more detail, can you tell people the time of the course and, has the venue been decided? Oh, yeah, the Kokiri Center in Raglan.

What will the course consist of?

Erin: What does the course consist of?

Arron: Yeah.

Erin: The first part of the morning we talk about informed consent.

So in New Zealand we have legislation that is the Health and Disability Commissioner Act, and that let’s anyone in New Zealand know that if they want to choose a medical procedure they can, and if they don’t want to choose it, then there is no mandatory push in New Zealand to have a vaccine if they don’t want to have it.

So we cover that a little bit, just so that parents know that they still have the right to decide whether that medical procedure is right for their child or not.

That is the first part of the morning.

Then we actually delve a little bit into the history of vaccines, because for a lot of people they think that vaccines have always been well received and well supported by most people.

In fact, ever since vaccines started, there have been people who have been concerned about their effects, especially their side effects.

So that’s our morning basically.

We talk about informed consent and history and then, as we move into the afternoon, we start looking at the ways the body functions quite adequately on its own if they’ve got good nutrition, and obviously breast milk for those who are little.

Then we also talk about a range of naturopathic, traditional, and also some of the concerns that there might be around using pharmaceutical medications with children with having a fever.

So we talk really practically in the afternoon about how you can look after your family’s health by making sure they have a good start.

Arron: So obviously you are looking at having the body being able to defend itself, but if people haven’t vaccinated for various diseases, and then they get them, is there also advice on how to treat them once you’ve got them?

Erin: Yes, we go through five of the diseases that are concerning to most people at the course.

Those five diseases are measles, which is very topical at the moment. We also go through chicken pox, because there is a new vaccine that has just come on for chicken pox.

We look at whooping cough, we look at tetanus, and we also talk about mumps. We just talk about those five main diseases and any other diseases that people are really concerned about.

We encourage them to go and read up as much as they can about them so that can allay some of those fears.

Arron: So I’m 45, and I’m sure at least three of those would have been diseases that I had as a kid, and I’m fine.

So why this increasing range of vaccinations?

Erin: Well, a type of chicken pox, for example.

Most people have had chicken pox as a child and apart from a bit of itchiness and possibly a fever, and maybe some scabs that have to sort of disappear, most people get through chicken pox fine.

The really interesting thing is, we are seeing more and more elderly people who are starting to get shingles and that is happening because the new verracella vaccine for chicken pox, is actually taking chicken pox out of the community.

So what would happen would be that you have a risk population in the elderly who used to just get the immunity booster regularly by children getting chicken pox in the community.

Now that that is not happening because of the vaccine, we’ve actually got an elderly population at risk.

You got chicken pox and you’re fine. I think the tricky thing is that people say, “But that’s three days off work.”

Arron: Yeah. I’m sorry. I’ve heard that argument and the government looks at things from the big perspective of keeping everyone at work.

There is something about what you are saying about the chicken pox that..I’ve forgotten what I was going to say…How much of a big deal is it…I guess you’re not expected to comment on how much of a big deal that is, that adults have to take time off work.

Erin: Anyone who has a family knows at some point the unpredictability of children being unwell is going to mean that they need to back up plan.

So when people have unvaccinated children, they often realize they need to have support around them, they need a boss who is going to let them have a couple of days off if their child is unwell.

Because, don’t forget that usually unvaccinated children, and this is a generalization, are well children.

So they are not off for colds and coughs and earaches and all the list of things that quite often children who have an immune system that is being stimulated regularly.

So these children might have three or four days off for chicken pox, but that would probably be only one or two of the childhood diseases that may get in their lives, and for the rest of the time they are absolutely not off sick a lot.

Arron: So are you saying that kids who have vaccinates, regularly scheduled vaccinations, are more likely to have other colds and what have you.

Erin: Well, the interesting thing about that is that there has never ever been a vacc/unvacc study to show the health of both of those two groups.

And yet only in about the last two or three weeks, a study came out of 12- to 16-year-olds in America, from a home schooling group, and across the board the evidence shows that children who weren’t vaccinated were less likely to be at the doctor’s with eczemas, asthmas.

All types of the usual things that we think children just get.

And the ones who were unvaccinated were most usually  than the ones who were not.

But this is something that the pharmaceutical companies have refused to do again and again because they….

Arron: There is no money…

Erin: We should do a study of vacc’d and unvacc’d that would be ethically unfair to the unvaccinated group of children who are going to be at risk of getting some of those diseases.

So I’ll let that one sit a little while.

Arron: Let’s face it. The job is to make money, so there is no money in doing a test like that.

But I remember what I was going to ask before about the chicken pox/shingles connection.

So you are saying that older people need to be exposed to chicken pox at reasonably regular intervals to prevent them from getting shingles.

Erin: That’s correct.

So when we have it constantly in our community, we keep having our antibodies to that disease regularly pushed up.

And the same for measles, but measles are another whole conversation.

Arron: What do you get as an older person if…

Erin: ….children and they don’t get chicken pox anymore in the community, then you have that older group who is at risk of getting shingles.

Now shingles is not the end of the world, but it can be very very debilitating for someone who is already elderly and unwell.

Arron: So if you got shingles right now, the best thing you can do is go and find a child with chicken pox.

Erin: No, I think it’s too late by then.

Arron: Oh.

Erin: But what happens with shingles is you get it recurring again and again and again, once it is in your system.

Every time you get stressed or every time your immune system goes down, for example, sometimes when elderly people are at admitted to hospital for whatever reason, the immune system can be down then and they can be at risk of getting shingles just because of the stress of being hospitalized.

Arron: Okay, can you tell us a bit about how breast milk provides immunity for children, or is that something that has always been believed or trusted?

Erin: Well, belief and trust probably isn’t good enough for these days and I think what we have noticed more and more about breast milk, just going back to the money, is that there is no money to be made out of breast milk.

So people create it themselves.

They feed their babies and what breast milk is, really and really simply, is it is the key that unlocks the baby’s immune system.

So if you think of the baby’s immune system as being immature, premature, or not quite working, that is correct, but it doesn’t mean that it is not as powerful as the adult immune system, but it just needs to be very very slowly unlocked.

So each time a baby is breastfed, each time the baby gets antibodies from its mother’s milk, it slowly and very very eloquently unlocks the immune system, so as it gets to be a two- and three-year-old, it starts to function as it would be an adult immune system.

There are lots and lots of studies about breast milk coming through, and that is around things like creating a good micro biomes, or good bacteria diversity in the gut, meaning that baby is going to have an immune system that copes with kids at daycare, it copes with flies on the windowsill, it copes with nana giving it a big kiss when its quite little.

All of those things are meant to prime or educate the baby’s immune system, but of course it is so little, it doesn’t want to react to every single little thing.

So the other thing that breast milk does is keeps the baby in a noninflammatory state.

It is not until the child gets older and starts to introduce different food into its diet, that you see some inflammation happening.

So whether that’s like a baby eczema or just a chesty cough, or any of those things that start to react with the baby as it gets older.

Arron: Breast milk is obviously the perfect food for a newborn baby, isn’t it?

Erin: Yes, absolutely.

Arron: The issue of diet. It is really hard to keep the kids away from lollies, that sort of thing.

I remember as a parent of young kids, I was always a little bit frustrated. It’s like there were people out there who were drug pushers – they are lolly pushers.

They think it’s nice to give kids sweet things, but what is your take on that?

Erin: I think kids love treats and I think parents, and especially grandparents, they love to give treats.

But I think the days of knowing that sugar isn’t the best thing for not only the immune system, but for a growing child, these are types of other things to do as a treat, such as reading a book, whether it’s getting stationery from the stationery shop, stickers.

Going to do activities together, and I think we are so used to having sugar be a really quick fix for a smile on someone’s face is, where in reality long term it is getting to be more and more suspect about how detrimental sugar is to children and especially to children’s immune systems.

Arron: So would you endeavor to keep all sugar, all refined sugar out of a child’s diet.

Erin: Certainly while the child was very young, I would.

The thing about human milk is that it is very very sweet.

So children are naturally getting the sweet taste anyway, except that is kind of a mild sweetness.

When someone has a sugar lolly, that’s like times 100 because it’s sucrose syrup.

So all of a sudden that child goes from sort of a sweet taste that they sort of like, to like, wow, that’s like basically…

Arron: Fireworks.

Erin: And there are lots of studies done between mice and having sugar water and having cocaine in the water.

There is a very similar reaction to what goes on in their brain.

So I think we have to re-look at sugar in some ways, and certainly keep it away as much as we can.

But of course, New Zealand has traditions with Easter and Christmas, and I think you have to be careful you don’t become so concerned about it that there is not some relaxation around having your cultural events.

Arron: Yeah, I guess you don’t want your kid to see everyone else having it and they are not having it and it becomes a big issue in that regard.

Erin: Yeah, I agree.

Arron: So what about if people are wanting to vaccinate anyway?

What do you think about the issue of vaccinating really earlier, six weeks of age, which does happen?

Erin: Well, it is interesting that it starts at six weeks of age, because that was traditionally when mother went back to the doctor to have her six-week postnatal checkup.

Arron: Okay.

Erin: So there are other countries that don’t start at six weeks, but we do, and that is about catchment.

So if you are here anyway, having yourself checked, then let’s get the baby checked at the same time.

What families don’t realize is that they can go for their six-week check but they don’t have to vaccinate their baby.

They can go back at three months, they can go back at five months or six months and start the vaccine schedule whenever they decide that is going to be right for their family.

Arron: It does seem really really early, the baby is still so fragile at six weeks.

Erin: And also their immune system, like I said, is very nonreactive.

Even having a vaccine that early, it might not actually get the response the vaccine manufacturers are wanting, because of breast milk and because of the baby’s immune system.

So there is certainly a lot of information that tells us that it might be better if we are vaccinating, to start a little bit later.

Arron: Okay, more on that topic. I’ve heard there are other ways, other techniques of vaccinating instead of injecting.

You can take an oral spray that goes through all the body’s defenses, is that right? Are you able to tell me anything about that at all?

Erin: There is something called homeoprophylaxis that might be what you are thinking about.

Arron: It could be, I don’t know the word.

Erin: Yeah, because with the vaccine schedule from the Ministry of Health, we have most of them injections, although there are some vaccines that do come, like the flu vaccine for adults, I think you can get in a spray.

But homeoprophylaxis is something completely different and that is using homeopathic principles.

So the easiest way to explain it is first of all you really need to find out about homeopathy to find out whether it is right for your family.

Secondly, all the vaccines that we have on our schedule have been made into a homeopathic remedy and that remedy is given at the same time as the schedule would be given from the Ministry of Health.

So in a way it is mimicking the schedule we currently got and for some families who are not quite ready to not vaccinate, but they also are not convinced that they should vaccinate, they think it is like an in between auction so they are still doing something very proactively as well as breast milk, but they are not choosing the adjuvants and things that go through our pharmaceutical vaccines.

Arron: What was that word you just used there? Adjuvants?

Erin: That is what is inside of vaccine.

So you have your antigen, which is in there to create immunity.

But alongside that you have things like aluminum, formaldehyde, polysorbate-80, so you have a whole lot of other factors.

You even have detergent powder, like not powder, but something that is in there to keep the vial and to keep the vaccine solvent so it can actually be injected into the person.

So there are quite a lot of things in the vaccine that are reactive to the body.

The antigen is probably the least reactive, but of course that has to be in there to get the immune response that people want.

Arron: Okay. Something I just wanted to touch on before we go, is fevers and managing fevers.

If our child’s temperature goes up, is it important to get the temperature back down as quickly as possible?

Erin: Well, no, the most important thing is to watch the child, so not to worry about the numbers on the thermometer, to make sure the child is comfortable and they are being looked after, given lots and lots of fluids.

Human milk is ideal, but things like coconut water or just plain water is also useful.

I think we’ve gotten really really quick at trying to reduce a fever when, in fact, the fever is there for a reason.

It is burning off the bacteria, burning off the virus. Just like you would have a burn up in the back garden.

You know, you don’t want to put any water on that burn up in the back garden before all the rubbish has burnt off.

So what is happening with a fever is something is in the baby’s system or child, and the body is creating its own furnace, its own heat, to get rid of that infection or virus.

And I think we are really really quick to try and put it away and stop it and reduce it. But what can happen then, is the fever will actually last longer.

But we do talk about fevers in the course and we talk about ways of managing the fever, but one of those ways is actually to observe, to hydrate and to know when to ask for help.

Arron: I think people are worried that there is a certain temperature, the body gets to a certain temperature, and then death is inevetible.

People are worried that the body will just keep upping the ante, keep pushing the temperature too high until it finishes itself off.

I suppose that is a terrible phrase, but…

Erin: More likely, they are concerned about the child having a seizure.

So sometimes if a fever goes up very quickly, or if it is reduced very quickly, there is a window there that the brain thinks, gosh, we need to shut off, so what it does is has a seizure, it just stops.

Arron: Okay.

Erin: That probably is more concerning for families.

But the risk of actually having a fever and dying – that would have to be something incredibly serious, like a meningitis or something that that person is probably already hospitalized for.

It is very unlikely to have a fever and die at home.

Arron: Well, it’s been very good to talk with you. There are lots and lots of other things that I could ask you about, but I guess that’s what the course is for.

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