A father whose baby girl died hours after she had the MMR jab yesterday hit out at "scare tactics" being used to boost vaccination uptake.

Paul Gentle, from Plymouth, described as "terrible and irresponsible" a senior government adviser's claim that it would take the death of an unvaccinated child for parents to "come back to their common senses".

The claim was made in a Sunday newspaper as worried parents paid for 250 Westcountry children to be given single vaccinations, costing £80 each, at a special outreach clinic, near Truro.

The Department of Health continues to insist that the MMR vaccine is safe.

But public faith in the combined measles, mumps and rubella vaccine has fallen dramatically during the last few months amid fears that it could cause autism and bowel disorders.

Yesterday, the senior government adviser - a member of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation - refused to be named in the article, in which he said a measles scare would lead to people "queuing up" for the MMR jab.

He added that if people did not take up the vaccine, measles would become a question of the "survival of the fittest", with children whose parents refused MMR on "crazy" safety grounds being put at risk.

But Mr Gentle, whose 15-month-old daughter Emma stopped breathing just six hours after receiving the MMR vaccine, in 1998, said such scare tactics would only drive more people to seek single jabs.

"This sort of thing is irresponsible. They should be looking at solutions to the problem, not scare tactics like this," he said.

"I would dispute the fact that safety grounds are 'crazy'. There are thousands of children out there with reported damage.

"Even if my beliefs were wrong, the Government should be addressing them. This sort of scare tactic is just going to get more people to go private because they offer a service that the Government and NHS won't."

Following distrust among parents, measles immunisation levels in some areas have fallen to about 65 per cent. The World Health Organisation recommends a general immunity level of 95 per cent to prevent outbreaks.

Mr Gentle and his wife Nicola - along with hundreds of concerned Westcountry parents - took their son to the temporary vaccination clinic at Three Bridges, a school for the autistic, in Blackwater, near Truro, on Saturday.

Vaccinations were carried out by Direct Health 2000, a private health firm which travelled to Cornwall from London.

A spokesman for the company said of the MMR vaccine: "It's perfectly safe for a lot of children but it is equally quite clear that it isn't safe for a small amount of children and, while the Government looks for herd immunity in the majority of children, it is not acceptable that these children should be damaged."

Mr and Mrs Gentle refuse to have their two-year-old son Ross vaccinated with the MMR jab after the death of their healthy baby daughter Emma, in September, 1998.

Their first son Alex, had been given the MMR vaccine with no problems a couple of years before Emma. But soon after she was vaccinated she stopped breathing. When she was finally resuscitated, 40 minutes later, she had suffered severe brain damage.

Three tortuous days followed for Paul and Nicola before doctors announced she had suffered brain stem death. Paul then had to take the decision to have the life-support machine switched off.

He said: "How do you tell a child his sister has died? I had to go through all that with Alex. When we had him and Emma vaccinated we were never really aware of the potential implications. The realisation that the vaccine must have played a part in this dawned very quickly and then you have got all the guilt - if she hadn't done it she would still be here - and we carry that guilt with us every day."

Mr Gentle said the treatment Emma was given in the emergency room meant that the coroner was unable to determine the cause of death. "He didn't say it was and couldn't say it wasn't the MMR vaccine," he said.

"All we know is six hours after the vaccine this healthy girl was dying. You can draw your own conclusions from that."

A Department of Health spokesman yesterday refused to comment on how the Government viewed the adviser's words. She added that the Government did not know who the adviser was. "This is an independent expert on immunisation and nothing to do with the Government," she said.

"We are here to protect children's health and the combined vaccine is the best way to do it. There is no medical evidence that MMR causes bowel disorder or other problems. Single vaccination leaves children open to risk of infection between vaccinations."

Dr Nick Cooper, WMN medical expert and Totnes GP, said all of the evidence, collected internationally, showed that there was no link between MMR and autism or inflammatory bowel disorder. In his area, he said, uptake of the MMR vaccine had hardly fallen.

pberger@westcountrypublications.co.uk