For some patients with Odra, vitamin A supported by RFK Jr. It leaves them more ill

Doctors in Western Texas see Odra patients whose diseases complicated an alternative therapy supported by vaccine skeptics, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Secretary of Health.

Parents in Gaines in Texas, a center of a raging Odra epidemic, are increasingly turning to supplements and unverified treatment methods to protect their children, many of whom are not vaccinated, against the virus.

One of these supplements is cod liver oil containing vitamin A, which Mr. Kennedy promoted as an almost wonderful medicine for measles. Doctors in the Covenant Children’s Hospital in Lubbock in Texas claim that they were now treating a handful of unvaccinated children who received so much vitamin A that they had signs of liver damage.

Some of them received unsafe doses of cod liver oil and other vitamin A supplements for several weeks, trying to prevent measles infection, said Dr. Summer Davies, who cares for very ill children in the hospital.

“I had a patient who was ill only a few days, four or five days, but I have been taking him for three weeks,” said Dr. Davies.

While doctors sometimes give high doses of vitamin A in the hospital to manage forceful measles, experts do not recommend taking it without supervision of a doctor. Vitamin A is not an effective way to prevent measles; However, two doses against measles, pigs and vaccines are about 97 percent effective.

At high doses, vitamin A can cause liver damage; arid, peeling skin; hair loss; and rarely seizures and coma. Until now, doctors from West Texas hospitals said that they saw patients with yellowed skin and a high level of liver enzymes in their blood work, both signs of damaged liver.

Many of these patients were in the hospital in terms of forceful measles infection; Doctors discovered liver damage only after routine work in the laboratory.

On Tuesday, the explosion, which began in January, spread over over 320 people in Texas. Forty patients were hospitalized and one child died.

In the neighboring countess of Recent Mexico, the virus fell ill with 43 and hospitalized two. Seven confirmed cases in Oklahomie were also associated with the explosion.

Local doctors and health officials will become more and more concerned about the growing popularity of unverified remedies in the field of prevention and treatment of measles, which, as they are afraid, causes delay in critical treatment and vaccination rejection, the only proven way to prevent measles infection.

In Gaines, alternative medicine has always been popular. Many in a immense Mennonite community in the area where most cases have been focused, avoid interacting with the medical system and warn the long tradition of natural remedies.

Health officials have found that the recent popularity of the employ of vitamin A to the Oder can be attributed to the Fox News interview with Mr. Kennedy, in which he said that he heard about “almost wonderful and immediate recovery” with treatments such as cod liver oil, which, as he said, was “the safest employ of vitamin A.”

IN essay At Washington Post on Tuesday afternoon, Kevin Griffis, who was the director of communication at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention until last week, wrote that he partly resigned due to the service of Mr. Kennedy’s explosion.

“In recent weeks, I watched CDC how experts in career infection are designed to spend valuable hours in vain to find medical literature in support of the preferred methods of treatment of Kennedy,” said Griffis.

In weeks after an interview with Fox News, pharmacies In Western Texas, it fought for maintaining oil supplements with vitamin A and cod on shelves. “I haven’t heard anything about vitamin A until he said on television,” said Katherine Wells, public health director at Lubbock.

One local doctor – whom Mr. Kennedy mentioned in an interview with Fox News one of the doctors who told him “what works on Earth” – opened a makeshift clinic in Gainas and began to issue various treatment, including vitamin A supplements, in order to treat dynamic measles and preventing infections.

Dr. Davies said that she suspected that most of the children she treated took vitamin A supplements at home.

Experts say that vitamin A can play an critical role in “maintenance care”, which doctors provide patients with forceful measles infections.

It works by supplementing bodily stores exhausted by a virus, which strengthens the immune system, said Dr. William Schaffner, a specialist in infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

He said that in the hospital doctors give children only two doses of measles vitamins, usually within two days, and “calibrate very carefully” amounts depending on age and weight.

Dr. Schaffner emphasized that this is not a wonderful virus treatment and that there are no antiviral drugs for the Oder. And there is no reliable evidence that vitamin A helps prevent infection in children in the United States, where vitamin A deficiencies are extremely sporadic.

In fact, giving children repetitive, high doses of vitamin is unsafe. Unlike other vitamins that are washed out of the body by urine, excess vitamin A accumulates in adipose tissue, which increases the likelihood that it will reach a unsafe level over time.

“I think that this kind of preventive employ is particularly disturbing,” said Dr. Lara Johnson, another doctor at the hospital in Lubbock.

“When we have children taking it for weeks and weeks, you potentially have toxicity accumulatedINShe added.

Dr. Johnson added that local doctors are particularly concerned about relying parents on without a prescription-which labels do not always reflect the amount of vitamin, which they contain-and take recommendations regarding dosage from unverified sources.