A Harvard pediatrician replies to parents worried about day care, autism and vaccines.

I recently put my kids in day care and they have had constant cold symptoms and mild diarrhea. I realize day care is an adjustment and exposes them to all sorts of new bacteria and viruses, but it’s been more than a month and I am having symptoms as well. How long should this be expected to last?

Dr. Claire McCarthy: There are all sorts of studies to show that children who attend day care get sick more often than those who don’t. The number of illnesses each year varies a lot from child to child, from about three times a year to as much as six or seven —which could feel like almost constant illness to a parent, especially if the parent is catching the illnesses, too!

As much as this may make you want to pull your kids out of day care, it isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It turns out that getting exposed to plenty of bacteria and viruses when you are young may be a really good thing—because it helps promote the healthy development of the immune system. In fact, research has shown that early exposure to germs can decrease a child’s risk of getting asthma and other allergic diseases. It may even decrease their risk of certain cancers such as Hodgkin’s disease…

With all the publicity about autism and immunizations, I’ve chosen not to immunize my kids. What are your thoughts?

There is a lot of publicity about autism and immunizations. What there isn’t a lot of, though, is scientific data to link them. Children get lots of immunizations in the first two years of life—and that’s when the signs of autism emerge. So it’s entirely possible, if not probable, that families or doctors will begin to notice autistic behaviors within a month or two of a child’s getting a vaccine—but that doesn’t mean the vaccine caused the autism…

Source: Newsweek
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20643575/site/newsweek/