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January 20, 2001                     Search  www.feat.org/search/news.asp

 

170 Cases of Autism Linked to Vaccine in UK: Pub Health Scandal

Also: * Shame On Officials Who Say MMR Is Safe: Editorial

·        ‘When Friends Ask Should Children Be Immunised,

My Answer Is No’

 

[”All hell will break loose” warns fellow autism researcher Paul

Shattock commenting on today’s release of Andrew Wakefield’s latest

research. By Lorraine Fraser in the Telegraph UK.]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/et?ac=004193535831504&rtmo=VDqDVDwK&atmo=rrrrrrrq&pg=/et/01/1/21/nmmr21.html 

The consultant who first raised concerns about MMR vaccinations has disclosed to The Telegraph that he has identified nearly 170 cases of a new syndrome of autism and bowel disease in children who have had the triple-dose injection.

Andrew Wakefield, a consultant gastroenterologist at the Royal Free Hospital in London, said that in the “majority” of cases parents had documentary evidence that their child’s physical and mental decline had followed the vaccination.

Professor Wakefield said: “Last week in our clinic we saw nine or 10 new children with exactly the same story, referred by jobbing paediatricians from around the country who said, ‘This child developed normally, had a reaction to MMR and is now autistic’”.

In his first public comments since the row erupted in 1998, when he reported on 12 cases, Professor Wakefield said that he remained seriously concerned by the safety of the vaccine, despite reassurances from the Department of Health.

He said: “The department says that the safety of MMR has been proven.  The argument is untenable. It cannot be substantiated by the science. That is not only my opinion but increasingly the view of healthcare professionals and the public.

He said: “Tests have revealed time and time again that we are dealing with a new phenomenon. The Department of Health’s contention that MMR has been proven to be safe by study after study after study just doesn’t hold up. Frankly, it is not an honest appraisal of the science and it relegates the scientific issues to the bottom of the barrel in favour of winning a propaganda war.”

The doctor, who was fiercely attacked by health officials for voicing his doubts three years ago, said in an exclusive interview that he felt driven to break his silence because of the accumulating evidence. His remarks will infuriate the Government and sharpen the dilemma of parents over whether to have children innoculated with MMR.

It emerged last month that a rising number of doctors and nurses were worried about giving second doses of the vaccine, and pressure is growing for its separation into its three component vaccinations, spread over three years. In his 1998 article in The Lancet, Professor Wakefield reported finding a devastating combination of bowel disease and autism in 12 children.

His revelation that that figure has reached almost 170 cases will shock parents and doctors and add pressure on the Government to justify its vaccination policy. This month Dr David Salisbury, the head of the Government’s immunisation programme, insisted that MMR was safe.

The vaccine, which contains live measles, mumps and rubella virus, has been given to millions of children in the UK since its introduction in 1988 but the take-up rate has fallen sharply since Dr Wakefield made his original claims.

Ten days ago health chiefs warned parents that Britain could face a measles outbreak unless more had their children vaccinated with MMR.  Professor Wakefield said, however, that if an outbreak were to erupt it would be the fault of the health department, which had “failed to address the safety issues”.

The doctor and his colleagues are testing the hypothesis that the measles virus from the vaccine can lodge in the gut of susceptible children, damaging the bowel and causing autism, and that the addition of the mumps virus makes that more likely.

 

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* * *

 

Shame On Officials Who Say MMR Is Safe

[Telegraph editorial by Lorraine Fraser.] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/et?ac=004193535831504&rtmo=qxMxqx99&atmo=rrrrrrrq &pg=/et/01/1/21/nmmr121.html <- - address ends here.

When Andrew Wakefield first told the Department of Health three years ago of his fears about the combined measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine and described to ministers the terribly damaged children that he had examined, he assumed that he would be taken seriously.

Since then, however, he has been pilloried for voicing his concerns and the department’s only response to his findings has been to undermine or ignore them. In fact, despite being aware of worrying new evidence, it has continued unwaveringly to reassure the public of the safety of the combined vaccine which a growing number of doctors fear may have triggered serious side affects in thousands of previously healthy children.

After a period of public silence, Dr Wakefield, an expert on inflammatory bowel disease, has decided to risk the wrath of the department again because he believes that he has now amassed enough evidence to seriously question the Government’s stance.

In an exclusive interview with The Telegraph, his first substantive comments since he provoked the row in 1998, Dr Wakefield has disclosed that he and his colleagues at the Royal Free hospital in north London have examined and diagnosed 170 cases of a new syndrome of bowel disease and autism which defy the official wisdom.

More often than not, these profoundly affected children had fallen ill after being given MMR, having been normal, thriving children up to that point. He said: “Tests have revealed time and time again that we are dealing with a new phenomenon.”

“The Department of Health’s contention that MMR has been proven to be safe by study after study after study just doesn’t hold up. Frankly, it is not an honest appraisal of the science and it relegates the scientific issues to the bottom of the barrel in favour of winning a propaganda war.

“The official reaction to this debate is a great shame. The parents were right. They came to us in 1995 saying their children had been developing normally had met their milestones; speech, language, social interaction, good eye-contact.

“Then following MMR these had disappeared; the children had lost all their acquired skills and been diagnosed as autistic. Second, they had bowel problems which, the parents were sure, were linked to their autism. Third, there is an epidemic of this disease.

“We took them seriously and found that they were absolutely right. Now what do we do when they say to us ‘I think this is MMR’? Do we take that seriously and investigate it or do we sit at the end of a phone in the Department of Health in Whitehall and say ‘I’m terribly sorry you child has autism but it’s all a coincidence’?

“If you are mandated to check on vaccine safety and maintain public confidence you don’t just dismiss the idea as a coincidence. That is not good enough, it is not good medicine.”

Although he sees himself as primarily a scientist in pursuit of objective truth [he trained at St Mary’s hospital medical school in London and is a qualified surgeon] he has now become a champion of parents who feel that their fears have been ignored. He is braced for the furore which will erupt this weekend after the publication of his outspoken comments and a paper criticising the paucity of safety research on MMR.

He first provoked a storm in 1998, when he and leading colleagues

published a paper in the medical journal The Lancet describing a new form of

 

serious bowel damage in 12 children with autism and reported that several parents had said their child’s physical and mental decline followed MMR vaccination.

Since then they have been testing the theory that measles virus from the combined MMR vaccine can colonise the bowel of susceptible children, producing inflammatory bowel disease which then, via a disruption of the chemical balance in the body and brain, leads to autism. Dr Wakefield admitted last night that the researchers have yet to prove their theory. He insisted, however, that there is evidence enough from the research to be deeply concerned.

In this weekend’s paper, published in Adverse Drug Reactions, a respected medical journal, Dr Wakefield and a leading epidemiologist, Scott Montgomery, from the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, reveal that the longest period of follow-up in any published safety study was just four weeks.

Evidence of bowel effects and interaction between MMR’s measles, mumps and rubella components were ignored. It says that as long ago as 1979, autism researchers had found that unusual exposure to viruses, including MMR’s constituents, was a risk factor for autism.

Dr Wakefield told The Telegraph that he sent an advanced copy of this analysis to the government’s Chief Medical Officer Liam Donaldson last May.  The department has declared it “bad science”. Professor Dame Rosalind Hurley, however, a former chairman of the Medicines Commission, describes his paper as a “welcome contribution to the on-going scientific debate”.

Dr Wakefield said: “Our new paper is not anti-vaccine. It is about the safest way in which to deliver these vaccines to children in order to protect them against acute infectious disease and against the long-term adverse reactions that I believe we are now seeing.

Officials should have noticed the warnings from earlier studies that such a combination could lead to problems, he said. The safest option while doubts remain, he insisted, was for the three vaccinations to be given to children separately.

“If measles epidemics come back then they come back because of the failure of regulators to address the safety issues, to recognise those clues in the early scientific papers which should have alerted them to the possibility of long-term side effects and to respond to the question marks that have been raised. I think they have misread the public mood.”

* * *

 

‘When Friends Ask Should Children Be Immunised, My Answer Is No’

[By James Le Fanu, Telegraph UK.] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/et?ac=004193535831504&rtmo=qxMxqx99&atmo=rrrrrrrq &pg=/et/01/1/21/nmmr221.html <-- address ends here.

I take a dim view of health scares for the obvious enough reason that the hundreds I have encountered in my 15 years at The Sunday Telegraph have proved to be without foundation. Their unifying feature, whether it has been the imminent heterosexual Aids epidemic, passive smoking, declining sperm counts, electromagnetic fields and so on ad nauseam, is that they are both biologically implausible and intellectually incoherent.

The exception, clearly an important one, is the alleged link between the MMR vaccine and childhood autism, highlighted yet again last week by the disclosure that the safety studies conducted prior to the vaccine’s introduction lasted a mere four weeks. By definition there was thus failure to detect adverse symptoms appearing after this time, which renders quite meaningless the official protestation that the vaccine has been proven to be “safe”.

The immediate response to Dr Wakefield’s report of 12 children whose autism and bowel symptoms appeared to follow soon after their MMR immunisation was that it was “coincidence”. The MMR is usually given around 18 months of age, which is also the time it takes for parents realising that there may be something wrong with their child’s development to obtain a specialist’s opinion and be told the diagnosis.

Further “coincidences” explanations appear to be vindicated by a survey conducted by Professor Brent Tayler of London’s Royal Free hospital.  On investigating the circumstances surrounding the diagnosis of autism in almost 500 children in north London, he found that the timing was the same irrespective of whether the child had been immunised or not. So our parents might, quite naturally, have suspected that with their child’s autism and MMR immunisation coming so close together they must be related. But they were wrong. End of health scare. Or is it?

Mosty children with autism are born with the condition, although it may take up to 18 months before it is diagnosed, but the characteristic feature of Dr Wakefield’s cases is that the children’s initial development was entirely normal and they achieved their milestones just as predicted.  Then suddenly and catastrophically they lost the skills that they had already acquired and they became withdrawn, intellectually uncurious and socially disconnected.

This type of devastating “regressive” autism, where the wiring of the normal brain seems to go haywire, has been recognised in the past as a rare variant, accounting for at most five per cent of all cases. In Professor Tayler’s survey they constitute 25 per cent and in an even more recent one from south London they constitute 50 per cent.

Simultaneously, while the proportion of cases of regressive autism has escalated, so has the total number - a four-fold increase both here and in the United States in the past two decades, when the MMR vaccine has been widely used.

Professor Tayler’s survey completely fails to address either of these phenomena, which self-evidently are highly relevant to the postulated link with the MMR vaccine. Hence his conclusion that it is all just “coincidence’ is, like the four-week safety studies, quite meaningless.

 

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