Vitamin K Deficiency Bleeding in Newborns– Guess Why?

MPR, which is distributed by Haymarket Media (I couldn’t figure out in the time available to me what MPR stands for) sent me an email today, repeating an article in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (a great little mag for statistics nuts), that four cases of Vitamin K deficiency bleeding were noted in newborns at a single hospital in Nashville, TN between February and September of this year.  Three of the neonates had bleeding into the brain, and one had gastrointestinal bleeding.  One victim now has a motor deficit; the other three are too young to evaluate.

Why have you never seen a case of Vit K deficiency bleeding?  Because newborns are routinely given an injection of Vitamin K shortly after birth in the nursery.  Neonates who do NOT have this injection face an “81 times greater” risk of deficiency bleeding (frequently into the brain) than those who DO get the shot.

The shot is optional, that is, parents are informed beforehand and can opt to not have their baby injected.  One would imagine that a nearly one hundred times greater risk for such a serious disease would make the average parent opt in and choose to get the shot.  But no.  At least not in Tennessee.  The shot has been routine since 1961 throughout the United States. 

The incidence of “early” and “classical” Vitamin K deficiency bleeding in neonates who do not get the shot is about “0.25% to 1.7% of births; incidence of late VKDB ranges from 4.4 to 7.2 per 100,000 infants,”

“At the Nashville hospital with the highest proportion of neonates not administered vitamin K, 3.4% of 3,080 infants discharged from the newborn nursery received no vitamin K injection. In contrast, 28.0% of 218 neonates at birthing centers did not receive vitamin K. Case-finding efforts revealed no additional cases of late VKDB in Tennessee in 2013.The relative risk for developing late VKDB has been estimated at 81 times greater among infants who do not receive intramuscular vitamin K than in infants who do receive it” [MMWR report, Nov. 15]

So, there are the statistics.  One would think that, based on those numbers, a parent would insist on getting a Vitamin K shot at birth if it didn’t cost an inordinate amount of money.  On the other hand, even a small expense may deter a parent from getting the shot.  If the parent refuses the shot because they can’t afford it, and then the baby develops grave illness from, say, intracranial bleeding, that costs an enormous amount of money, who pays?  Well, in fact, we all pay, because the baby whose parent can’t pay the bill will be supported by a state Medicaid program, whose expenses are paid by taxes.

Therefore, the issue of whether children automatically get vitamin K shots at birth becomes an important economic one for the society as a whole.  This is particularly so because the expenses caused by vitamin K deficiency are totalled up through the whole society and become large as a result.  So, for a risk of one percent of births having bleeding, we have ten thousand affected out of every million born, and if there is an average cost of ten thousand dollars per patient, then there is a hundred million dollars spent for every million births.  That is why our government budget is measured in the trillions of dollars, and that is why we must address these costs so as to minimize them.

Few Americans are aware that the USA spends almost twice as much per person for medical care as any European nation, or any developed nation for that matter, such as Canada.  These costs are unnecessary and they go in to the pockets of the medical manipulators as excess profits.  We do not receive care that is twice as good as they get in Europe; in fact, based on life expectancy, our care is worse.  To repeat, these excessive costs do not deliver better care, only higher profits into the pockets of the medical establishment.

Automatic vitamin K shots at birth is only one of many medical practices that have already been shown to lengthen lives and reduce medical costs.  If these practices were put in place all over the country, regardless of patient’s ability to pay, our total costs would actually go down dramatically, and we would be much healthier.  This is the best reform of health care that money could buy.