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Last updated on Thursday, May 22, 2014
(UNDATED) - You may have heard of a new study claiming that some people may be victims of too many vaccines.
A doctor in Indy doesn't think much of it.
The study published in the journal Molecular and Genetic Medicine claims that the rapid increase in the number of vaccines given to U.S. children is causing an overload to their immune systems.
The researcher, Dr. J. Bart Classen, has been one of the few doctors who has made claims against vaccines for years and now says the immunity overload has helped cause the epidemics of obesity, diabetes and autism.
Previous studies claiming to link vaccines to autism have been debunked, and Dr. Christopher Belcher, an infectious disease specialist at Peyton Manning Children's Hospital in Indianapolis, believes this research is not thorough.
"They are smaller studies that have been done with fewer patients, and some of the things he reports is with individual patients. It's hard to make a scientific decision about what happens with one person," Belcher said.
Belcher says Classen primarily cites his own work and not the work of others in his research, and he says it isn't very scientific to claim that someone who becomes obese or develops diabetes many years after being vaccinated.
"By that time, you are pushing into the peak ages of when you start seeing obesity and diabetes and these problems develop anyway, so time doesn't always mean causation," Belcher said.
He adds that if vaccines are leading to diabetes in the U.S., why isn't it doing so elsewhere?
"The same vaccine is used in Europe, which has much lower rates of obesity and diabetes."
Fear over vaccines has led to reduced rates of immunization and, as a result, outbreaks of diseases that had mostly been eradicated, such as measles and mumps.
While Belcher says there is nothing inherently wrong with studying the safety of vaccines, what Classen is doing is something else.
"We need to research safety, but all the research being done is not showing these links (to disease) that he is showing in his individual studies."
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