Vitamin K and newborns

I recently retired as a professor in the Edward A. Doisy Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Saint Louis University School of Medicine.

Who was Edward A. Doisy? He was the only Nobel Laureate from Saint Louis University. He shared the 1943 prize in Physiology or Medicine for identifying the two forms of vitamin K and determining their structure, enabling synthetic production to treat bleeding disorders.

Vitamin K is routinely given by injection to newborns to prevent Vitamin K Deficiency Bleeding (VKDB), a dangerous condition caused by low clotting factors. Newborns have limited vitamin K stores, breast milk provides low levels, and their intestines cannot yet produce it, making the shot crucial for preventing sudden, severe internal bleeding.

Now, in the third decade of the 21st century, parents in the richest nation on the planet are refusing to protect their newborns from preventable death because they’ve been duped by conspiracy theories. 

“At the morgue, the babies were brought in with their diapers and blankets and with their hospital ID bracelets still wrapped around their tiny ankles. The pathologists’ findings were like those you would typically see in ailing adults, not newborns — the kind of bleeding seen during strokes or brain tissue loss similar to what happens when radiation is administered to treat cancer.

 

“Their autopsies, which took place over the last several years, all came to the same conclusion: The deaths were caused, in whole or in part, by a rare but potentially fatal condition known as vitamin K deficiency bleeding.

 

“In almost every case, the babies’ deaths could have been prevented with a long-standard vitamin K shot. But across the country, families — first in smatterings, now in droves — are declining the single, inexpensive injection given at birth to newborns to help their blood clot.

What’s going on?

“Two weeks ago, at a House subcommittee hearing, Rep. Kim Schrier, D-Wash., pressed Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to reassure parents that the vitamin K shot is safe. He refused and pushed back.

 

“I’ve never said, literally never said, anything about it,” Kennedy said.

 

“That’s exactly the point,” responded Schrier, who is a doctor. “You don’t say anything about it, but the doubt you’ve created about all of medicine and science is causing parents to make dangerous decisions.”

Why does the Trump Administration hate newborns?

 

https://www.propublica.org/article/more-parents-decline-vitamin-k-shot-newborns

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Yes, the CDC can change its mind

The Nobel Laureate economist Paul Samuelson famously acknowledged in a Meet the Press interview: “Well when events change, I change my mind. What do you do?” This observation applies to the advice from medical authorities such as the CDC and WHO during the COVID pandemic. Some members of the public are fond of pillorying these agencies for having published different guidelines at different times, as though health officials are in the business of issuing ex cathedra dogma rather than responding to incomplete and ambiguous information. Science doesn’t deal in proof, it deals with the weight of evidence. A scientific hypothesis is one that is capable of being tested and falsified by experiment. I get it. I used to teach problem-based learning to first year medical students, and they often struggled with what to do with incomplete and ambiguous information, which is what physicians in clinics do every day. Sometimes, one cannot wait for all the tests to be completed and all the data analyz...
Read more

I agree with RFK Jr.

Though it feels weird to say it, RFK Jr and I agree on something: curtailing direct-to-consumer marketing of pharmaceuticals. “ The Trump administration is discussing policies that would make it harder and more expensive for pharmaceutical companies to advertise directly to patients, in a move that could disrupt more than $10 billion in annual ad spending.   Although the US is the only place, besides New Zealand, where pharma companies can directly advertise, banning pharma ads outright could make the administration vulnerable to lawsuits, so it’s instead focusing on cutting down on the practice by adding legal and financial hurdles, according to people familiar with the plans who weren’t authorized to speak publicly on the matter.   “The two policies the administration has focused in on would be to require greater disclosures of side effects of a drug within each ad — likely making broadcast ads much longer and prohibitively expensive — or removing the industry’s ability to d...
Read more

About that Trump lawsuit

So Trump is suing Rupert Murdoch for defamation because of the release of a salacious doodle. Nothing remarkable about Donald J. Trump weaponizing the legal system against his opponents, I know. But there are some things that do bear remark here: “ . . . he's suing Rupert Murdoch personally. But you know who he's not suing? Lachlan Murdoch, who's actually the chairperson of News Corp and Fox, who's actually the decision-maker. Rupert Murdoch has no official role there anymore. He's an adviser.   “So, I thought that was revealing in a lot of ways, because it isn't just about going after the entity. It's sort of this expansion spillover, trying to send as much of a message as you possibly can. He's sort of hitting every potential lever, not just against Murdoch and that empire, but then all the other media properties in the future. It's also about sending an example.” “HAYES: Yeah. That, to me, is the point here, is that these lawsuits are not lawsuits...
Read more