Doctors in West Texas see the measles patients who complicate their diseases due to an alternative treatment approved by skeptical vaccines, including Robert F. Kennedy Junior, Minister of Health.
Parents in Jeans, Texas, the center of raging measles, have increasingly turned into uninterrupted supplements and treatments to protect their children, many of whom have not been vaccinated, against the virus.
One of these nutritional supplements is cod liver oil that contains vitamin A, which Mr. Kennedy promoted as a semi -miracle treatment for the group. Doctors at the Children’s Covenant Hospital in Lubuk, Texas, says they have now dealt with a handful of unjust children who have so much that they have so much that they have signs of liver damage.
Dr. Samar Davis, who is concerned with severe diseases in the hospital, said that some of them have received unsafe doses of cod liver oil and other vitamin A supplements for several weeks in an attempt to prevent measles.
“I had a patient who was only two days, four or five days, but I was taking it for three weeks,” said Dr. Davis.
While doctors sometimes run high doses of vitamin A in the hospital to manage severe measles, experts do not recommend taking them without the supervision of a doctor. Vitamin A is not an effective way to prevent measles; However, two doses of measles, mumps, and vaccine are effective about 97 percent.
In high doses, vitamin A can cause liver damage. Dry, peeling skin. Hair loss, in rare cases, episodes and coma. Until now, doctors in West Texas Hospitals said they have seen patients with yellow skin and high levels of liver enzymes in their blood work, both signs of damaged liver.
Many of these patients were in hospital due to severe measles infection; Doctors discovered liver damage only after the routine laboratory.
As of Tuesday, the outbreak of the disease, which started in January, spread to more than 320 people in Texas. Forty patients were taken to the hospital, and one child died.
In the neighboring New Mexico provinces, the virus 43 is hospitalized. Seven confirmed cases in Oklahoma were linked to the outbreak.
Local doctors and health officials have become increasingly concerned about the increasing popularity of unproductive treatments to prevent measles, which are afraid that people will delay cash medical treatment and refuse to vaccinate, which is the only way that has proven its seriousness to prevent measles.
In Jeans County, alternative medicine was always common. Many in the large Mennonite community in the region, where most cases have been collected, avoid interaction with the medical system and a long tradition of natural remedies.
Health officials said that the recent popularity of vitamin A using measles can be tracked to an interview with Fox News with Mr. Kennedy, as he said that he heard about “almost miracle and immediate recovery” with treatments such as cod liver oil, which he said was “the most vitamin A” applications.
in Opinion As for The Washington Post on Tuesday afternoon, Kevin Griffis, who until last week, was the director of communications in the centers of control and prevention of diseases, wrote that he had resigned in part because Mr. Kennedy dealt with the outbreak.
“In the last weeks of me at the Center for Disease Control, I was seen as experts in the mineral job who were assigned to spend precious hours searching for medical literature in vain to support Kennedy’s favorite treatments.”
In the weeks that followed the Fox News interview, pharmacy In West Texas, she struggled to keep vitamin A liver supplements and note the cod liver on her shelves. “I haven’t heard anything about vitamin A until he said on TV,” said Lubuk’s general health director, Catherine Wells.
One of the local doctors – which was appointed by Mr. Kennedy in an interview with a Fox News as one of the doctors who told him “What works on the ground” – opened a temporary clinic in Guinness Province and started getting rid of various treatments, including vitamin A, to treat active measles and prevent infection.
Dr. Davis said that she suspects that the majority of the children she treated had taken vitamin A supplements at home.
Experts say vitamin A can play an important role in the “supportive care” that doctors offer to patients with severe measles.
Dr. William Shavener, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Vanderbelt University, said that he works by renewing physical stores exhausted by the virus, which enhances the immune system.
In the hospital, doctors offer only two doses of vitamin to children with measles, usually for two days, and “carefully calibrating” quantities depending on age and weight.
Dr. Shavener confirmed that it is not a miracle cure for the virus, and that there are no antiviral drugs for the group. There is no reliable evidence that vitamin A helps prevent infection in children in the United States, where the deficiencies of vitamin A are very rare.
In fact, giving children frequent, high doses of vitamin is dangerous. Unlike other vitamins, which are wiped outside the body through urine, excess vitamin A accumulates in the fatty tissues, making it more vulnerable to reaching dangerous levels over time.
“This type of preventive use I think is particularly concern,” said Dr. Lara Johnson, another doctor at Lubok Hospital.
“When we have children they take for weeks and weeks, it is likely that you have a cumulative effect of the heavenandShe added.
Dr. Johnson added that the local doctors were especially concerned about relying on parents on nutritional supplements that do not need a prescription-their posters do not always reflect the amount of vitamin that contains-and the dose recommendations from unlimited sources.