[Clodfobble]

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

I'm having trouble with the basic concept. If his body is fighting one bug, and you introduce a different bug, the immune system can't multitask? Does the immune system fight different bugs in different ways? Is it a change in body chemistry that makes the kid nuts?

It's not about the bug, it's about the adjuvants in the vaccine--the ingredients that deliberately throw your immune system into overdrive, to elicit the desired immune response to a bug that your body typically wouldn't bother with. The role of the tonsils in the body isn't exactly understood, though we know they produce antibodies in youth and generally stop by adulthood. Throw the tonsils into overdrive while there's also strep living in there, and the effect could in theory be an autoimmune disorder like PANDAS. The problem with the disorder is not actually the strep itself, but the antibodies the immune system is creating in reaction to the strep.

Originally Posted by Undertoad

A Google search to correlate the terms PANDAS and FluMist only turns up one result, a thread of concerned parents trying to decide what to do.

Your search was too narrow, as it's not the FluMist in particular but the nature of vaccines overall. Google search PANDAS caused by vaccine or vaccination and the results get much larger.

Originally Posted by glatt

Refresh my memory, what did the removal of tonsils do for your kid(s)? Did it help a lot?

Minifob was diagnosed with PANDAS (by an Ear-Nose-Throat specialist, not by our autism doctors, though it very often goes hand-in-hand with autism diagnoses, just like celiac, food allergies, and most other autoimmune diseases. Some cases of autism actually appear to be nothing but PANDAS to begin with, triggered at an early enough age to severely affect brain development.)

Once the disorder is triggered, it's going to be a lifelong condition to manage. Every single time the kid is exposed to strep, there will be neurological problems. The tonsils and adenoids are very, very susceptible to strep infections. If you remove them, the strep has nowhere to live except a thin sheen of skin on the surface of the back of the throat, which is easier to defeat (always with antibiotics, from now on.) Some hardier species of strep can also live in the intestines--but again, nothing nearly as vivacious as the kind of colony that can set up shop in the tonsils/adenoids without even trying. Removing them now will A.) get rid of the majority of the current infection in one fell swoop, and B.) make future infections less frequent, and less severe.

Edit to add: Also, as I learned last month, pink eye can be caused by a strep infection of the eye (though it can also be other bacteria too, like staph.)

We unfortunately ended up removing his adenoids and his tonsils in separate surgeries, but after both, he was a completely different kid. He regressed again after the adenoid surgery because a new round of strep infected his tonsils, and antibiotics were only minimally effective by then. After the tonsils came out, his teacher at school said "something just clicked," and he has had huge jumps in social, verbal, and cognitive skills. Of course, his rampant OCD symptoms have also disappeared.

Your friends should look into the book Saving Sammy, though they've probably heard of it already if they've gotten far enough in the process to locate a doctor who diagnoses and treats PANDAS. There's also a very active PANDAS Yahoo group.