Parents are refusing Vitamin K for newborns

"For most of his 10 years as a neonatologist, Dr. Timmy Ho encountered one or two parents per week who didn’t want their newborns to receive a vitamin K injection, a standard step to prevent bleeding.  Recently, in just one week, he saw three or four per day — numbers, he said, that were becoming more common.

One of the babies suffered a type of bleeding in the brain that vitamin K could have prevented, said Dr. Ho, who practices in Boston. He had never seen that before.

Vitamin K plays a crucial role in blood clotting but doesn’t pass to the baby through the placenta effectively, and there isn’t much of it in breast milk. Infants are deficient in it until they can eat solid foods. This can lead to bleeding, from minor oozing from the umbilical cord to potentially life-threatening gastrointestinal or brain hemorrhages.

One injection immediately after birth is very effective at fixing the deficiency, and it has been routinely administered in the United States for more than 60 years.

Now, the shot appears to have been swept up in broader anti-vaccine sentiment, even though it isn’t a vaccine..."

The story continues at The New York Times.