There may be juvenile-onset diabetes. The pertussis vaccine, in particular, has an impact on the insulin-producing centers in the pancreas (the "islets of Langerhans"). Over-stimulation of these islets, with their subsequent exhaustion, can lead to diabetes or its opposite -- hypoglycemia (low blood sugar).

There may be "cranial nerve palsies" of various kinds. The cranial nerves pass from the spinal cord over the skull to the organs of perception. So the baby is suddenly discovered to be blind, deaf, or dumb. Sudden infant death is presumably caused by palsy of another cranial nerve (the vagus nerve) which is responsible for providing the breathing impulse to the lung.

Worth noting is the fact that many of these conditions are thought to be "congenital" (blindness, deafness, inability to speak, mental retardation). But "congenital" conditions are almost never detected at birth. Instead, when the baby is nine months or a year old, the parents at length realize that he or she cannot see, hear, or speak, or is mentally retarded. Since no other cause for these conditions can be determined, the physician decides that they are "congenital." But by this time the baby will have received three DPT shots, and these shots are known to be capable of causing blindness, deafness, dumbness,and mental retardation.

We concluded that the DPT shot causes a minimum of 12,000 cases ofsevere neurological damage every year, n addition to the 6000 deaths diagnosed as Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.

The neurological damage includes juvenile-onset diabetes, so-called "congenital" blindness, deafness, mental retardation, autism, epilepsy, seizures, various kinds of paralyses and palsies, and other neurological disorders.

The Congress of the United States was sufficiently impressed by DPT: A Shot in the Dark to adopt, in the end of 1986, the National Vaccination Compensation Act which establishes an office in Washington to receive complaints about vaccination damage and, if the complaint seems well-founded, to pay compensation to the family.

This compensation system is now in operation and has made several hundred awards, for a total of $80 million. Another 3000-4000 claims await resolution. About half the awards are for children who have died as a result of a childhood vaccination. These deaths had nearly always been classified by the attending physician as "Sudden Infant Death of unknown origin."

Before DPT: A Shot in the Dark was written, American health authorities had always rejected even the possibility that a baby could die from vaccination.

Now, while 6000 deaths and 12,000 cases of severe neurologic damage may seem a large number, any biological phenomena occurs along a gradient or spectrum ranging from "normality" to severe damage. If there are 12,000 cases of severe neurological damage every year, there must be hundreds of thousands of cases of milder damage.

What about these millions of children who fall somewhere between "normality" and obvious neurologic damage?

My book, Vaccination, Social Violence, and Criminality describes children and adults who have been damaged by vaccination but not severely enough to be institutionalized. Their condition I have called the "post- encephalitic syndrome."

Encephalitis (whether from vaccination or from some other cause) can range from severe to moderate, even subclinical. It is also possible to have encephalitis in which the acute symptoms are extremely mild but which still does much long-term damage.