MMR doctor links 170 cases of autism to vaccine

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 Then suddenly and catastrophically they lost the skills that they had already acquired and they became withdrawn, intellectually uncurious and socially disconnected.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.

To put it another way, the rise both in the frequency and type of autism is precisely what would be expected were the link between the MMR vaccine and autism - as originally identified by Dr Wakefield and attested to by so many parents - genuine. So now, when I am asked by friends whether they should have their children immunised, my answer is "no".