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Article #5542LA Smog Caused My Son's Coma...are any doctors saying anything to the other kids????
From: Matthew J Vona
Date: Tue, 06 Aug 1996 00:00
Date: Tue, 06 Aug 1996 00:00
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-------->I am Posting This For A Friend, please respond to email given in text<--------- One morning, my four-year-old son, who was living with our family in a smoggy area of Southern California (Orange County), was rushed in a comatose condition to the hospital. The immediate question asked of me was, "Did he get into any poisons?" The answer was, "No." He had no adverse effects after being comatose for about three hours. It was at this time that I noticed that the hospital was overcrowded with pediatric seizure patients with symptoms similar to my son's. I spoke to a few of the other mothers, and the conditions surrounding the onset of the seizures seemed to be similar. Although the final medical diagnosis for my son was that of a cerebral hemorrhage, my son's pediatrician suspected something different and recommended that he be seen by a pediatric neurologist. It was then determined that my son had an abnormal EEG and was diagnosed as "seizure prone" (he was "so sensitive to something he was eating or to something in his environment that he experienced a seizure"). My son was immediately placed on medication (Mebral), and I was told that he would most likely continue on that medication until his teens. Two years later, we moved to Riverside County--an area in Southern California even more smog-laden than the county from which we had moved. My son's health problems increased--heart racing, abnormal sweating, breathing difficulties, sleepwalking, frequent urination, weight loss, etc. When an attempt was made to take my son off of seizure medication, he experienced yet another seizure. Two years after our move to Riverside County, I also began to experience health problems very similar to my son's with one exception--I experienced an electrical discharge in my right eye, not in my head (a seizure). The inside of my right eye was burned...not unlike that which occurs when an individual looks at an eclipse. My health continued to fail until I saw an allergist in the Sacramento area. He immediately diagnosed my health problems as signs of poisoning (specifically, a sensitivity to pollutants) and stated that I would have to move to a cleaner environment. Upon our family's move to a cleaner area of California, a positive change was seen in my son's health as well as in mine. My son was seen by a pediatric neurologist in San Francisco who performed an EEG. My son was found to have a normal EEG and was taken off seizure medication with no adverse effects. Also, upon further investigation, I found that the day prior to my son�s first seizure, there had been a smog alert in the area in which he�d been playing for the whole day. Two recently publicized pediatric seizure cases are as follows: First, a young boy living in the Southern California area whose seizures were finally controlled by a long-hidden, high fat "seizure diet"; second, a young boy whose seizures were finally controlled by removal of one side of his brain, resulting in his having to reacquire speech abilities, etc. Questions: Are pediatricians seeing the increased seizure problems of our youth and attempting to make any correlation between pollution levels and seizure demographics? Do they suspect pollution as a plausible cause? Is change of residence a possible alternative to be considered in the management of these patients? PLEASE RESPOND TO: JOEVONA@aol.com
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X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII X-Google-Thread: 10df74,848b468df72eda6e,start X-Google-Attributes: gid10df74,public From: mvona@neuro.gu.se (Matthew J Vona) Subject: LA Smog Caused My Son's Coma...are any doctors saying anything to the other kids???? Date: 1996/08/06 Message-ID: <4u8drr$c73@news.gu.se> X-Deja-AN: 173100905 content-type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 organization: ENOG mime-version: 1.0 newsgroups: ca.environment