You're a good parent. You try to do the right thing for your children. You feed them balanced meals, make sure they get plenty of rest, try to keep them from watching violence on television. And you take them to the pediatrician to immunize them from childhood epidemic diseases.

But in your attempts to do good for your kids, you may actually be doing them harm. Some medical authorities are now saying that inoculations may be the cause of some serious illnesses, including the ones they were intended to eradicate. They are even believed by some to have caused death in some children. When Key resident Myriam Sitterson, a mother of three, began reading up on the dangers of vaccinations from information she retrieved over the National Vaccine Information Center's Internet site, she was appalled.

"It's the scariest thing I've ever seen in my entire life," Sitterson explained. "It's ruining the health of the whole nation. They take your little babies and they poison them. They inject the most innocent of victims with toxins. They convince you that the children need it. They convince you that it's absolutely to their benefit. And for people who deify doctors, this is very dangerous."

The untold side of the story

Sitterson read about Zachary Helms, an infant who died 33 hours after being inoculated at the county health clinic, and of 20-month-old Spencer, who died the day after his fourth dose of the diphtheria, pertussis and tetanus vaccine.

She read that when Japan raised the legal vaccine age to two, its cases of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome dropped significantly, and increased significantly when the vaccination age was lowered back to three months. She read that vaccines are composed of highly toxic substances, such as formaldehyde, a known carcinogen, and ethylene glycol (antifreeze); that they may be a cause in several auto-immune diseases such as lupus, cancer and Epstein-Barr virus; that the U.S. government in 1986 established the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, which has paid out more than $663 million to vaccine injured patients to date; and that even Dr. Jonas Salk, inventor of the first polio vaccine, testified before a Senate subcommittee that nearly all polio outbreaks since 1961 were caused by the oral polio vaccine.

"After reading this information, I could not with any good consciousness immunize this child," Sitterson said of her youngest child, 23-month-old Myriam, who has not yet been inoculated. "It would be poisoning her."

Sitterson has from the beginning tried to do the very best for little Myriam's health. She gave birth to her at home to avoid the potential dangers of a hospital birth, such as harm to the mother and child from the epidural shot. She breast fed her rather than giving her chemical formula, and now feeds her mainly organic, whole foods. She gives her natural remedies when she is ill, and plans to immunize her homeopathically.

And little Myriam, her mother said, is one of the healthiest babies she knows. "We have a natural immunity. We were created perfect. You're body can fight off lots of stuff without having to take medication. If you bombard your body with vaccines, you are not capable of fighting off illness as easily as you would if you had a pure immune system."

With her other two daughters, Sitterson said she was not aware of the dangers of inoculation and dutifully followed the doctor's orders.

Her second daughter, Sophia, was a happy baby during the earliest part of her life and then became an extremely irritable child after receiving her vaccines. Sitterson said Sophia had ear infections, a common reaction to inoculation, each month and was prone to crying fits and waking up in the middle of the night.

"I feel horrible," Sitterson confessed. "I could have totally killed my child or destroyed her immune system for life because I was trying to do the right thing."

That was when Sitterson's mother told her she, too, had had a severe reaction to a vaccination and ended up a chronically ill child. But none of Sitterson's three siblings had any reaction to their vaccines.

"Everyone handles the vaccine differently," said Sitterson, who is studying naturopathy, the practice of natural health care, through a correspondence course. "Some kids it will kill. Some it will make chronically sick. Some it will mess up their immune systems later on. You can't tell what it's going to do."

The consequences

But Sitterson has faced some pretty weighty consequences because of her choice not to immunize her third child in the traditional method. When she attempted to register 24-month-old Myriam for day care at My First Place, a toddler program in The Galeria, Sitterson was declined.

"I spoke to a pediatrician who recommended that I not get this child who has not been vaccinated because that child has no protection from any other child's sicknesses," owner Maria Verdeja said. "Thinking of the protection of her child and the other children there, I would rather not. You never know what kids have. There's always a kid with a cold and there's always a chance her kid would get it and if anything develops from that, I would rather not have that."

Sitterson ran into the same thing at the Key Biscayne Presbyterian Church's preschool. "The church has a policy not to accept children into their schools who are not vaccinated," said Liz Pesch, director of the preschool. "I feel sorry for her. She's had a hard time, but it's not my decision."

Marjorie Dekeersgieter, an acupuncture physician who grew up on the Key and is raising her three children on the island, said she felt similar pressures that Sitterson is feeling.

Dekeersgieter said daughter Caitlin, now four, was not immunized until she was three because Dekeesgieter twice walked out of the pediatrician's office, where a pamphlet warned that one out of every 200 children gets a reaction from vaccines, a statistic which seemed dangerously high to the concerned mother.

But Dekeersgieter said when she tried to enroll Caitlin at Brickell Christian School, she was given a deadline to immunize the child.

"I was kind of put into a corner about it," she explained. Reluctantly, Dekeersgieter began taking Caitlin to be vaccinated with one shot at a time, starting with tetanus. "I didn't feel like I was going to bombard her with more than one at a time," Dekeersgieter said.

Dekeersgieter said she still does not know whether she will fully inoculate her daughter. She has already attempted to obtain a religious exemption form from the state health department but became frustrated with the red tape and gave up.

Jackie Simms, on the other hand, cut right through the red tape. A former co-owner of the Oak Feed health food store in Coconut Grove and a mother of four, Simms convinced a state senator to sponsor a bill that allowed for a personal beliefs exemption to be added to the state's law mandating inoculation for all school age children.

"I took the responsibility for their health very seriously," Simms explained, "and I felt that it was in my hands. And from the reading that I had done, I didn't think it was necessary in this day and age to do that, so I took a very strong stance against it."

That was more than 10 years ago, when Simms' children were between the ages of three and 13, and the Florida law still limits exemptions to religious and medical reasons, although 19 other states do include a philosophical exemption clause.

"The only way around it is to lie, find somebody who's going to lie or keep your kids out of day care," Simms explained, adding that she did not want the decisions she made for each of her children to be on the record. "I don't think its worth battling with HRS [the state Health and Rehabilitative Services department] for my children, so sometimes I think you just have to do things your own way."

Simms said doing things her own way a decade ago was a bit easier than it is today.

"Basically in the school system at that time," she continued, "they want a piece of paper in each kid's file to satisfy HRS. It was enough to have a letter written by me in my children's file saying I was against it with the understanding that if there was an outbreak in the school that my children would be removed from the school, which was fine with me."

That choice would not be fine with every parent. Elysze Held, long-time Key resident, said her nine-year-old son, Zachary, has had all the age-appropriate vaccinations and is "very rarely sick."

"The proof is in the pudding," Held explained. "With my child, I don't take any risks and, not being an expert in the field, nor do I assume myself an expert in the field, I can only go on what has been suggested to me by somebody who I trust greatly. I don't believe in taking any unnecessary risks."

Suzy Westfall, mother of five-and-a-half-year-old Jake, agreed. She said Jake has been vaccinated with everything except the hepatitis shot, which is not required until age seven.

"I had him vaccinated maybe because I was vaccinated," Westfall, a local playwright, explained, "but also because we live in such a multicultural place with so many people moving in and out of our community and I would like to reduce the risks to Jake and I think he's a healthy enough kid to do that with. The chicken pox vaccine came along and I had him vaccinated for that because I thought, 'Why should any one go through that if they don't have to?'"

But Westfall said she doesn't have a problem with other parents' decision to refrain from inoculating their children. In fact, the fact that there have always been parents on the Key who have objected to vaccinations is the reason that Westfall and her husband, Alan Fein, inoculated their child.

"That's why I've gotten my son vaccinated: to protect him as much as I possibly can," she said. "I treat Jake and myself homeopathically most of the time, but at some point you have to deal with the medical options that are available to you because you have to reduce risks. As much as I would like to treat everything naturally, not everything can be treated that way. I respect everybody's choice. And I've made a choice for my son."

Don't ask, don't tell

Now Sitterson, like Simms and many other parents concerned about the dangers of immunization, is even leery of speaking to the press about her choices for fear that her child will be excluded from future educational opportunities or that HRS will take away her children.

Incensed, she feels she is being bullied. "It's the same exact reason as why I chose to have a home birth. No one could convince me otherwise. They lay you on a bed, they stick an IV in you, they give you an epidural which can cause severe damage to the mother and the child and they call it the normal way of giving birth. I don't buy it.

"It's a lack of choice. These are things you should have choices about."

But James Filenbaum, a New York attorney who is renowned for taking legal action on behalf of parents who opt out of traditional immunization since 1982, said Sitterson has nothing to fear.

Filenbaum said Florida's religious belief exemption can apply to any belief system, a fact that he has proven in eight landmark decisions which have set precedents for countless other claims.

"It doesn't matter whether anyone else has the same kind of belief that you have," said Filenbaum, who has proven this fact in federal court. "You can be, for example, a Catholic and hold a belief about what God requires of you. You don't have to have a priest or a pope agree with you. You don't have to have a name for your religion and you don't have to have written dogma."

What you do have to have is a fair amount of free time and possibly an attorney, something Sitterson is not sure she'd like to employ.

But she is sure that she does not want to inoculate her toddler by traditional means. And she is also sure that she does not want her child to be penalized for that decision for the rest of her life.

Continue to Part Two of this series about the pros and cons of inoculating small children.

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