Shame on officials who say MMR is safe

by Lorraine Fraser

 

[Telegraph editorial by Lorraine Fraser.] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2001/01/21/nmmr121.xml

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.”

ALL INFORMATION, DATA, AND MATERIAL CONTAINED, PRESENTED, OR PROVIDED HERE IS FOR GENERAL INFORMATION PURPOSES ONLY AND IS NOT TO BE CONSTRUED AS REFLECTING THE KNOWLEDGE OR OPINIONS OF THE PUBLISHER, AND IS NOT TO BE CONSTRUED OR INTENDED AS PROVIDING MEDICAL OR LEGAL ADVICE.  THE DECISION WHETHER OR NOT TO VACCINATE IS AN IMPORTANT AND COMPLEX ISSUE AND SHOULD BE MADE BY YOU, AND YOU ALONE, IN CONSULTATION WITH YOUR HEALTH CARE PROVIDER.