Adverse Reactions : autism

MMR: Don't treat parents like children

Bryan Hubbard — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 12:10:00 GMT

It’s all unravelling badly for our health guardians who have been trying their upmost to convince us that the MMR (measles-mumps-rubella) vaccine is perfectly safe.

In the past few weeks we’ve heard from the US that a court has awarded substantial damages to a family whose child developed autism after being vaccinated, and this week Dr Andrew Wakefield – the man who started the controversy about the autism link – began his defence against charges of professional misconduct.

Dr Wakefield’s case is an own-goal by health regulators who clearly wanted revenge for a study that they considered was damaging to their aim of achieving mass immunity from vaccination. Either way they can’t win. If they succeed in getting Dr Wakefield struck off, they’ll be accused of staging a witch hunt against a doctor who was trying to help parents. If Wakefield successfully defends the charge, his research will be vindicated. And all the time the MMR debate – and Wakefield’s claims – continues to get a public airing.

Meantime, health regulators have been throwing science at worried parents. They have said that study after study has conclusively established that the MMR is safe. Unfortunately, those who’ve taken a closer look at these studies have found a number of inadequacies or inconsistencies.

In one, a junior researcher who looked over the analysis discovered a basic mathematical error that hadn’t been picked up by the eminent peers who considered the paper worthy of publication. Other papers studied the children for a very short span, and some even admitted they had left out vital evidence because it as ‘unsubstantiated’. The whole sorry catalogue is revealed in the April issue of ‘What Doctors Don't Tell You’.

Parents are rightly concerned that our health authorities – in whom we place our trust – are not playing straight. Science looks too much like propaganda, and their arguments are becoming more hectoring in tone.

If they want children to be vaccinated, the health authorities must start treating the parents as the adults they are. Yes, there is a risk with the vaccines – it might be slight, but it’s there – and, yes, your child could be affected. Part of the message should also tell parents that there are also plenty of ways you can reduce the severity of these childhood diseases through good nutrition.

Unless medicine becomes the science it always claims to be, and stops being a propaganda machine for the drugs industry, parents will rightly remain reticent.

MMR: Mercury, the bringer of autism

Bryan Hubbard — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 16:08:00 GMT

The MMR-autism debate just isn't letting up, especially in the States where a TV drama has this week jettisoned it back onto the front pages.

The programme, Eli Stone, features a lawyer who wins a $1 million lawsuit for a mother whose child became autistic after having the MMR vaccine.

Doctors have been so concerned by the programme's impact on parents whose children are about to be vaccinated that they have rushed out a study that 'proves' autism is not caused by the vaccine. The study, which was due to be published in an upcoming issue of the medical journal 'Pediatrics', shows that thimerosal, a preservative made with mercury that was regularly used in vaccines until 2001, doesn't stay in the body for any great length of time.

After studying the 'before' and 'after' blood samples of 216 babies who were vaccinated, the researchers found that the mercury levels in the babies' blood lowered after a few weeks, and fell to a level that was just one-tenth of that predicted in earlier studies.

Underlining the significance of the study, leading autism expert Dr Nancy Minshew has given a "one hundred per cent assurance" to America's parents that vaccinations don't cause autism. "I think the issue is done," she told reporters.

I can only assume that Dr Minshew hasn't had the time to read another study, published in the Journal of Child Neurology, which has discovered a definitive link between mercury and autism. By re-analysing the data from another emphatic study published in 2004, Catherine DeSoto from the University of Northern Iowa has discovered a basic mistake in the calculations.

"A significant relation does exist between the blood levels of mercury and diagnosis of an autism spectrum disorder," she writes.

Not surprisingly, she found that the mercury doesn't affect all children in the same way. The most vulnerable were those children who were least efficient at removing mercury - and it could be that none of the children in the latest study had under-performing immune systems.

Perhaps Dr Minshew might like to bring down her 100 per cent guarantee a point or three.

MMR: Parents do it for themselves

Bryan Hubbard — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 11:36:00 GMT

Advocates of childhood immunisation consistently argue that there is no evidence to suggest that vaccines are dangerous. Claims that the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine in particular causes autism has never been established. In fact, they say, every study has shown conclusvely there is no causal link.

Most of the studies 'proving' the safety of vaccines have tended to be small - often involving hundreds of children - and over quite short time frames.

So a group of parents in the USA have got together to do the job properly. Generation Rescue has been formed by parents whose children have been diagnosed with neurological disorders - and, as concerned parents, they want to know why.

But instead of just accepting the consoling words of doctors and scientists, they decided to do the job themselves. And they did it in style, raising enough money to fund a research study that has involved 17,000 vaccinated and unvaccinated children in the states of Oregon and California, making it one of the largest ever research projects into the health implications of childhood vaccines. They also tracked the health of the children right up to the age of 17.

They discovered that in the younger age group, which included the four-year-olds, vaccinated children were two-and-a-half times more likely to have a neurological disorder than children who were not vaccinated, while vaccinated boys were more than twice as likely to have ADHD (attention deficit, hyperactivity disorder), and 61 per cent more likely to have autism.

The differences became more marked in the older children, aged from 11 to 17. In this group, a vaccinated child was more than three times more likely to have ADHD than his non-vaccinated counterpart, and 112 per cent more likely to have autism.

The study suggests that the vaccine can have a longer-term effect than researchers thought, which might explain why they were unable to discover a connection within the days and weeks they were monitoring the children following vaccination.

So, why haven't we heard anything about this study, which is a significant addition to the debate? Well, it was carried out by parents, it wasn't published in a peer-reviewed journal, and it wasn't funded by a manufacturer of one of the vaccines, a combination that guarantees media obscurity.

MMR: The myth of the herd

Bryan Hubbard — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 12:16:00 GMT

Health experts are concerned that the uptake of the MMR vaccine is still far too low to provide ‘herd immunity’ for the population. Vaccination levels have risen to 85 per cent overall following the autism scare - but they are still well below the 95 per cent recommended by the World Health Organization in order to achieve global protection from the disease.

The premise that supports the herd immunity theory is, of course, that the vaccine works, and offers years of protection.

But, at best, it works for some of the people some of the time – a fact that governments and health officials are loathe to reveal.

For instance, more than three-quarters of all measles cases in the UK that were diagnosed between 1985 and 1986 had been properly vaccinated. A similar pattern can be found in the USA. In one outbreak in 1986 in Corpus Christi, Texas, 99 per cent of affected children had been vaccinated. It’s a picture that applies across the whole of the USA where 80 per cent of all cases of measles occur in vaccinated children.

Even if the MMR provides some kind of protection at the time, it also seems to transfer the problem to later years. Before vaccinations became a national pursuit, 90 per cent of all cases of measles occurred in children aged between five and nine.

Now up to 64 per cent of measles cases are among the over-10s.

Autism and the MMR

Bryan Hubbard — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 11:00:00 GMT

Times are hard for our health regulators, who have been trying for years to put the lid on the theory that the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine may be linked to autism. A new study, prepared by the prestigious autism research team at Cambridge University,...(read more)