TERRY POLEVOY

The Record has published two anti-vaccine letters to the editor in the last two months. The first one represented the views of a fringe group of chiropractors known as CAC (Chiropractic Awareness Council). Their headquarters is in Guelph and one of their members was recently named the chiropractor of the year by a U.S. based group known as the WCA (World Chiropractic Alliance).

Chiropractors in our area have rarely stood up to oppose the anti-vaccine views of the CAC. Even during the depth and despair of the meningitis epidemic in 1997-98, which took the lives of two high school students, local chiropractors took months to address the issue.

This misinformation campaign by some chiropractors is clearly a public health crisis.

When opinions, not facts, come from uninformed people like Greg Weir, who admitted in his letter on Dec. 9 that he is no doctor, it's dangerous, too. He claimed that flu shots pose a risk. Where is the evidence?

However, when it comes from a member of a licensed health profession, such as a chiropractor or naturopath, this is inexcusable.

The College of Chiropractors of Ontario has a "proposed" code of ethics that prohibits their members from anti-vaccine activity outside their own offices. Their written policies clearly discuss what chiropractors can say, and can't say, about issues like immunizations.

Perhaps CAC members have their own set of guidelines. The Record needs to ask the CAC why the members believe what they do, and why. To speak as an expert in epidemiology and infectious disease is not the role of the CAC. Their members are almost all totally brainwashed by anti-medical, anti-vaccine activists around the world. Their personal communications to me have often been filled with more than just misinformation; they have been filled with vile and lascivious descriptions of what I do as a doctor.

Why anyone would trust their child's health to licensed health professionals who distort scientific facts is clearly a puzzle without an answer. Do anti-vaccine "doctors" hold other strange beliefs?

Why do they blame autism on vaccines, when it is clearly not so? Why do they blame ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) on vaccines, when it is clearly not so?

I challenge your readers to ask their chiropractor or naturopath how many hours of basic science in the areas of immunology, virology and public health that they have had in their training. Ask them to explain the worldwide disappearance of smallpox, or the elimination of measles, or polio from most of the civilized world.

Ask the chiropractors and naturopaths how much research money they spend on the elimination of those diseases, and how many studies they have published that states that their subluxation reduction treatments, or treatments based on fraudulent Vega meter readings, will kill one virus, or modify the immune response to any disease.

If they can't answer those questions, they should not be allowed to treat infants or children. They should definitely not be paid by OHIP or insurance plans. It is not a matter of just ethics here. Chiropractors are paid by our tax dollars to treat newborn infants and to give anti-vaccine advice to pregnant women.

That privilege should be taken away from them, as a reminder that the public's health comes first.

Health-care professionals have a responsibility to all Ontario residents.

Their personal distorted philosophical belief system should be held accountable. What better way than to withhold taxpayers' dollars from those who seek to corrupt the system by treating newborns with "adjustments" and to feed their parents with unsubstantiated and dangerous misinformation.