Purple crying:
- Peaks at two months old
- Unexpected- comes and goes and you don’t know why
- Resists soothing
- Pain-like face
- Long-lasting- up to five hours
- Evening and afternoon (1)
http://www.purplecrying.info/sections/index.php?sct=1& (P.S.- This site is very unprofessional with the number of punctuation and grammatical errors it contains.)
DTP crying:
- Often occurs at two months old- when the first shot of DTP is received
- Unexpected- the parent has been told to expect a slight fever, some fussiness, or maybe some swelling in the shot site at most as a reaction, so the crying seems to come out of left field
- Resists soothing
- Baby looks to be in pain
- Long-lasting- three or more hours
- Occurs a half hour to several hours after the shot- often in the afternoon or evening after returning from the doctor’s office (2)
Coincidence?
First of all, let me assure you that crying for hours is not a phase that every baby goes through. My son has never had a period of crying that went on for hours and we have always been able to soothe him by nursing him, cuddling him, or singing to him.
The Purple crying site intersperses anecdotes of normal crying (“He giggles during the day and starts crying at 6 pm like clockwork”) with information on crying that is prolonged and can not be soothed. It’s all one and the same, right? Wrong. The “6 pm clockwork” infant needs to go to bed while the baby who is screaming and won’t stop is experiencing an attack on her central nervous system. And incidentally, the Purple crying website assures you that your baby is not in pain, but offers no proof. Where are the MRI scans of the wailing infant’s brain showing that the pain centers are not active?
Actually, here is their reasoning as to why a baby who cries for hours on end can’t be in pain: “An important reason relates to what we have already described: if these features of crying were manifestations of pain, then we would have to accept that essentially all infants the world over, regardless of culture, are in pain for many hours for many weeks in the first months of life. It also would mean that other animal species who have similar distress curves would be in pain, and that premature infants were not in pain for the first couple of months, but then had weeks to months of pain after being well for six or eight weeks. None of this seems reasonable.” In other words: “Crying for hours can’t mean the baby is pain because babies all over the world over display this type of crying and if that many babies are crying for hours on end, then they can’t be in pain.” (3) However, the DTP vaccine has been administered the world over so if it is harmful, then the effects will be seen in babies from all over the world. Now, if there is a reported worldwide pandemic of swine flu, we are supposed to believe in mass suffering. But babies from around the world screaming for hours? They’re just crying to cry.
They go on to describe a study on the same page which showed that some babies at a doctor’s office for a normal physical examination cried more and louder than others, though they were in the same setting. All this shows is that some babies cry more than others. (Ya think?) So we are told that because some babies cry more than others, a baby who screams for hours cannot possibly be in any pain. Obviously concerns over the baby being in pain are something that these researchers have heard a lot, otherwise this material wouldn’t be going to such lengths to try and prove that the baby is in no pain at all. Well, when your child is screaming for hours, who are you going to believe, her or the doctor? As my dad said, “That goes against everything I know as a parent. When a baby cries like that, there’s something wrong.”
In years past, doctors told mothers to expect their babies to be fussy for several days after the DTP shot. When the baby began screaming, pediatricians said it was simply a normal reaction. Now, doctors don’t even associate it with the shot, it is simply a phase that infants go through.
The most comprehensive study of the pertussis vaccine was conducted at UCLA in 1978-1979, which compared the reactions seen in the 48 hours after vaccination in a group of children receiving the DT vaccine and those receiving the DTP vaccine. The study showed that 50 percent of DTP vaccinees developed fever, 34 percent showed irritability, 35 percent had crying episodes, 40 percent had localized inflammation, 3 percent had prolonged, inconsolable periods of crying and screaming, and 31 percent developed excessive sleepiness (compared with 14% in the DT group) (4). That was just in the first 48 hours- not enough time to see if brain damage would result from the reactions. Again, the CDC says, “More serious adverse events occur rarely (on the order of one per thousands to one per millions of doses), and some are so rare that risk cannot be accurately assessed.” They also say that prolonged episodes of screaming occur in only 1 in 1000 cases. (5) (Citation for this number is vague. The only reference listed is under a heading titled “Additional References” and is a book called Vaccines by Drs. Stanley Plotkin and Walter Orenstien.) 1 in 33 of the children in this study suffered prolonged, inconsolable screaming indicative of central nervous system complications/ encephalopathy. I’d say that’s pretty serious and common, myself.
(1) http://www.purplecrying.info/sections/index.php?sct=1& (P.S.- This site is very unprofessional with the number of punctuation and grammatical errors it contains.)
(2) A Shot in the Dark, Harris L. Coulter and Barbara Loe Fisher, pg. 32
(3) http://www.purplecrying.info/sections/index.php?sct=2&sctpg=11&
(4) The Vaccine Guide: Making an Informed Decision, Randall Neustaedter, pg. 127
(5) http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vac-gen/6mishome.htm
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