FEAT DAILY NEWSLETTER
Sacramento, California http://www.feat.org
February 11, 2002
News Morgue Search www.feat.org/search/news.asp
·
Why I Owe It To Parents To Question Triple Vaccine
Andrew Wakefield
·
Why Parents Are Angry About Autism
Nick Hornby
·
Top Doctor ‘To Resist’ more MMR Research
·
Measles Jab Media Blitz To Persuade Parents
·
‘Real Security Is A Single Jab’
·
Government Knows Measles Single Vaccine Is Effective
·
MMR: Will We Ever Be Sure It’s Safe?
·
An Epidemic Of Fear
·
Autism Screening For All Children To End MMR Fears
·
MMR - Your Questions Answered
·
‘This Is Just Not An Issue In France...’
·
MMR: A Policy In Meltdown
·
Why Japan Stopped Using MMR
·
Who Can We Believe These Days?
·
‘How Can We Ever Trust Them Again?’
·
Why Japan Stopped Using MMR
There was so much news on the MMR – Vaccine controversy
over the weekend that it produced a flood of articles out of the UK (but none in
the US). The first two articles are
presented whole, the remaining fifteen are listed below in bulletin format with
their respective links. This is big news,
but not here, yet.
* * *
Why I Owe It To Parents To Question Triple Vaccine
Andrew Wakefield explains why he first warned of a possible
link between the
MMR jab and autism
http://www.sundayherald.com/22194
‘What I’m advocating is that in the presence of this
question mark, a question mark that was put there by the parents, which we have
corroborated in repeated studies—while that question mark exists, at the very
least, parents de serve a choice of how they protect their children against
these infections, whether it be with the MMR vaccine or with the single
vaccine.
‘There is a very limited body of material bearing on the
safety of the vaccine, but those studies were totally inadequate from the
beginning. They looked at short-term outcomes three or four weeks after
vaccination, but these children regress insidiously over weeks or months, and
this is never ascribed to the vaccine by the attending physician .
‘I sit across from you as the parent and you say: ‘this is
what happened to my child, they were developing normally, they had speech, language,
social skills, they received their MMR vaccine and they developed bowel
symptoms and their behaviour deteriorated, I lost them, the light went out’.
‘You listen to that story, you don’t buy into it, but you
say: ‘is there anything I can do to substantiate this in my job as a physician?’
You investigate the symptoms and you find that there is an inflammatory bowel disease
that has gone unrecognised in these children . So the parents were right. So
when they say: ‘I believe my child regressed after the MMR vaccine’, do you
take that seriously? Damn right you do.
‘I don’t believe that [single vaccinations would lead to a
drop in take-up]. I think parents are well informed, they are not inherently anti-vaccine,
nor are we. We have advocated throughout that children continue to be protected
. But in the light of this evidence there is a question mark, and while that
question mark exists, parents must have the choice over how they protect their
children .
‘What we have done is to show that the parents’ story is
valid. We have found measles virus highly in excess of developmentally normal
controls in the diseased [bowel] tissue of children with autism, and not only
in the diseased tissue but in the very cells in that diseased tissue that you
would antici pate if it were the cause of the disease. This is a very
compelling observation that means, once again, that though causation has not
been proven, there is sufficient anxiety that the parents must have a choice .
‘ What actually precipitated this crisis? What
precipitated this crisis was the removal of the single vaccine, the removal of
choice, and that is what has caused the furore—because the doctors, the gurus,
are treating the public as though they are some kind of moronic mass who cannot
make an informed decision for themselves.’
* * *
Why Parents Are Angry About Autism
None of us knows the link between the jab and autism. But we
do know that
autistic children need better care and education. And they
need it now, free
from the constricting binds of red tape
[By Nick Hornby in The Observer.]
http://www.observer.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,647836,00.html
I have just had an argument with Islington Council about a
parking ticket, and I am angry. I got the ticket when I was dropping my
autistic son off at his mum’s house; I could not display the disabled badge
that enables me to park in her street because she and I have to share the badge
(if we were issued with two, we were told, we ‘might abuse the system’, a significant
indication of the trust invested in us), even though my son has two cars and
two homes - which means that there will always be a moment when the badge is
being transferred from one home to the other, which means that there will
always be a moment in which a traffic warden can issue one of us with a parking
ticket.
It was during that brief window of opportunity that the
traffic warden struck. It wasn’t his fault - he wasn’t to know - but I had
hoped that my letter of explanation would absolve me: after all, I could, in
theory, receive six parking tickets a week, through no fault of my own. No absolution
was forthcoming, of course. I was told that I got a ticket because I wasn’t
displaying a permit or a disabled badge - aaaaagh! I know I wasn’t! - which
means that no one had bothered to read the letter I wrote in the first place,
which then entailed another phone call, at the end of which I ended up slamming
the phone down. I will, I suspect, end up going to court.
I know, I know... It’s a minor, silly incident, and you
too have no doubt endured something similarly exasperating this week. But there
have been so many bureaucratic idiocies involving my son, and his health, and
his education, each one apparently avoidable, each one exhausting and
irritating and time-consuming. He has nearly lost his school several times, for
the pettiest of reasons, even though there is no educational provision for him elsewhere
(which is why desperate parents set it up in the first place), and even though
it has official recognition; and there is a problem surrounding his
statementing, and there are several difficulties connected with his treatment
at the Royal Free for the now infamous bowel disorder which may or may not have
a link with the MMR vaccine...
Indeed, so bureaucratic are these idiocies (and so idiotic
are these bureaucrats) that I cannot even mention most of them, for political
reasons: they are all ongoing, and as we are obliged at every single turn to go
grovelling pathetically for meetings and favours and permission and approval and
treatment, I cannot afford to upset anybody, especially as it is not only my
child who is affected, but all his schoolmates too.
We have heard a lot, in recent months, about
breeding-grounds for discontent. After all, we’ve been bombing a lot of them.
And it seems to me that the current MMR crisis can only be properly understood
in the context of the waking nightmare that is daily life for any parent of an
autistic child - and I’m not even talking about dealing with the condition
itself, which is nightmarish enough. Our grounds for discontent have been bred
in the municipal offices and Government departments of Britain, and if Tony Blair
and Yvette Cooper are serious about winning the propaganda battle over the MMR
vaccine, these are the places that they will have to bomb back to the Stone
Age. (I do accept that this bombing campaign should be purely metaphorical, at
least in its initial stages.)
Let’s assume for a moment that there is a link between the
MMR vaccine and autism. I know this is an enormous assumption, and that no such
link has been proven (nor, incidentally, has it been disproven, despite
Government and media suggestions to the contrary), but the point is that a
significant percentage of parents with autistic children - thoughtful,
intelligent, observant people, otherwise immune to conspiracy theories and
paranoid delusions - are entirely convinced that this vaccine has irreparably
damaged the lives of their children.
Can you begin to imagine their fury and hurt? They have
done what this and preceding Governments have told them to do, which is to
protect their apparently healthy kids against measles, mumps and rubella, and
as a result, they feel, they have ended up with permanently disabled children -
possibly incontinent, prone to screaming fits, irrational rages and
sleeplessness, children with severely impaired or possibly non-existent
communication skills... oh, and if you’re really unlucky, a child with a
debilitating and painful bowel disorder. First, they cannot get anyone to
diagnose the condition (the average age of diagnosis is six); and then they
cannot find the education they want (in some cases, they cannot find any
education at all). If they do find the education, then they often have to take
their local council to court to pay for it - the motto of our local authorities
seems to be ‘Stonewall ‘Til They Sue’. And one of the very few people showing
any interest in their child’s agonising bowels has been forced to resign from
his job, because his research does not fit comfortably with what the Government
wants to hear. These parents have, in other words, been hung out to dry.
Last week, I listened with growing disbelief and
rage as Yvette Cooper
(an otherwise smart woman who
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appears, sadly, to have been given a vaccination that has
turned her into a robot) accused anyone calling for single vaccines of ‘undermining
public confidence’, as if it were anyone’s job but her department’s to restore
it. The truth is, Yvette, that these
parents who have been on Panorama and London Tonight and in every national
newspaper saying that their children were made autistic by the MMR vaccine -
the very parents, in other words, who are engendering this panic, and whose
fears prompted Andrew Wakefield’s research in the first place - are really not
feeling very public-spirited right now.
This is their moment: the media are falling over
themselves to record what they have to say, and as a consequence they have, for
a few brief weeks while this crisis lasts, a power and a voice that is
consistently denied them otherwise. They are obsessed by the past, by what they
think caused their child’s condition, because the future looks so difficult, so
frightening and exhausting. Maybe if, at any stage, someone in officialdom had
attempted to assist them, rather than actively obstruct them - and after a
while, this obstruction begins to feel like naked hostility - they would feel a
little less bitter, a little less ready to point the finger of blame at what
may still turn out to be a harmless jab. One woman with an autistic child is
currently involved in five separate tribunals involving more or less every
single part of her child’s life. How strongly developed is her sense of public
duty at the moment, one wonders? How prepared is she to shut up in order to do
the Department of Health a favour?
Meanwhile, the Government and our health officials, in
their attempt to assuage our fears, continue to feed us information that is
partial, corrupted or downright wrong. A medical officer on Radio 5 Live quoted
from a Scandinavian study that she must have known has been discredited by the Medical
Research Council. Tony Blair referred to the unhappy Japanese experience with
the single vaccine, without telling us that it had been offered because a rogue
batch of the triple vaccine was provoking untoward reactions, notably
meningitis, in some children; the ensuing measles epidemic can be explained by
a subsequent and understandable loss of public confidence in government advice.
The Department of Health is still failing to monitor
autism, despite a 1997 recommendation of the House of Commons Health Committee
to do so. Disgracefully, parents in
Scotland, Tyneside and London whose children have developed inflammatory bowel
disease have been told that no such disease exists (to concede otherwise would
give credence to Andrew Wakefield’s work) and that therefore they are suffering
from Münchhausen’s Syndrome by Proxy - there have even been threats to take
very sick children into care. To paraphrase Jeremy Paxman: if the triple
vaccine is safe (and I reiterate - it might be), then why are these bastards
lying to us?
The truth is that none of us, not Yvette Cooper, not Tony
Blair, not me, knows whether there is a link between MMR and autism, and unless
the Government and medical establishment are mature enough to allow proper, independent
research, then we will never know. I suspect that in the end they will be
forced to treat us like grown-ups and give us the worst-case figures so that we
can make up our own minds; in the meantime we are faced with a potential
measles epidemic and an actual epidemic of autism. Even Sir Liam Donaldson, the
chief medical officer, referred to a fourfold increase, but other, respectable,
sources are quoting figures a lot scarier than that.
How long are we going to make parents of autistic children
wait for a diagnosis, when all the evidence shows that early intervention is
vital? How are we going to educate all these autistic kids, when there are
currently 76,000 of them fighting for 3,000 specialist school places, and when
we know from experts that it is only specialist education that can make any difference?
Who is going to treat the inflammatory bowel disease, now that one of the only
people in Britain who knows anything about it has been forced out of his job at
the Royal Free?
And how am I going to get out of paying this parking
ticket? Until Yvette Cooper and her colleagues start to address these questions
(although she can leave the one about the parking ticket until later, if she
likes), then parents will remain angry. And at the moment, an angry parent is a
dangerous parent, someone who will fire shots into the panicking crowd, simply
because he or she has nothing to lose. Hey, Yvette - would you like to talk?
* * *
‘How Can We Ever Trust Them Again?’
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2002/02/10/nmmr10.xml
Twelve years ago, the government gave assurances that
the first
version of MMR was safe. It wasn’t - it was linked to
meningitis and
withdrawn. So why should parents believe that the current
triple vaccine is
any better? Lorraine Fraser reports
* * *
Who Can We Believe These Days?
http://www.observer.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,647834,00.html
Our once automatic trust in medical authority has
gone, leaving
parents in agonies of uncertainty about what is best for
their children
[Andrew Rawnsley in The Observer.]
Asked again whether Baby Blair has had the jab, Downing
Street is exceptionally needled. ‘The attempt to personalise the issue is
frankly pathetic.’ Frankly, that could not be more wrong. There is virtually
nothing more profoundly unpathetic and deeply personal than the fate of your children.
* * *
Top Doctor ‘To Resist’ more MMR Research
http://www.scotlandonsunday.com/index.cfm?id=158672002
[By Camillo Fracassini.]
Further government research into the safety of the MMR
vaccine will be resisted, Scotland’s top medical official revealed last night.
Dr Mac Armstrong - the chief medical adviser to the
Scottish Executive - said he would not back any further studies into links
between the triple vaccine and autism.
* * *
Measles Jab Media Blitz To Persuade Parents http://www.femail.co.uk/pages/standard/article.html?in_article_id=99534&in_p
age_id=2 <- - address ends here.
The Department of Health is planning a publicity blitz to
persuade parents of the safety of the controversial MMR vaccine for measles,
mumps and rubella.
Final details of the campaign have not been agreed, but it
is thought likely to involve TV, radio and press adverts by Chief Medical
Officer Liam Donaldson, setting out the Government’s case for believing MMR to
be safe.
* * *
‘Real Security Is A Single Jab’ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/main.jhtml?xml=/health/2002/02/05/hwell05. xml&sSheet=/portal/2002/02/10/por_right.html
<- - address ends here.
Despite repeated assurances, thousands of parents are
paying for
alternatives to the MMR vaccine, says Christine Doyle
A private clinic in London that offers separate injections
for measles, mumps and rubella vaccines is being inundated with telephone
calls, such is the level of parental anxiety about the combined MMR vaccine.
* * *
Government Knows Measles Single Vaccine Is Effective
http://www.sundayherald.com/22232
[By Sarah-Kate Templeton and Jenifer Johnston.]
Despite the government’s current insistence that the
combined measles, mumps and rubella vaccine is the only option, in 1988 -- when
guidelines were issued—it stipulated that parents who refused the triple jab
should be offered the option of a single measles vaccine.
But in 1997, when the licence for the single vaccines
expired due to lack of demand at the time, the only vaccine available to
doctors was the combined MMR.
* * *
MMR: Will We Ever Be Sure It’s Safe?
http://www.sundayherald.com/22196
[By Sarah-Kate Templeton.]
With the medical establishment bitterly divided over
the triple
vaccine’s link to autism, we can only be certain of one
thing: we still don’t know enough about it.
When Dr Andrew Wakefield was approached by parents
claiming their children developed autism after receiving the MMR vaccine he was
sceptical. When the vaccine was
introduced in 1988 it was hailed as the key to eradicating the three childhood
diseases measles, mumps and rubella in this country.
* * *
Dogma on MMR Does Not Work
http://www.observer.co.uk/leaders/story/0,6903,647865,00.html
Parents need information and choice
[Leader in the The Observer .]
The MMR debate goes to the heart of the relationship
between the individual and society. This is an age in which people expect to
exercise choice; but there are times when the collective good must prevail. The
great programmes against cholera, polio and smallpox could never have taken
place had they not been enforced.
* * *
An Epidemic Of Fear
http://www.observer.co.uk/focus/story/0,6903,647858,00.html
[By Kamal Ahmed, Gaby Hinsliff and Anthony Browne in
The Observer .]
Whoever is proved right, the row over vaccination has highlighted
the public’s lack of trust in science and the Government.
At 3pm today St Paul’s Cathedral will fall silent as more
than 200 parents of children with autism gather for a service of prayer. Among
them will be Ivan and Charika Corea, whose five-year-old son, Charin, has suffered
from the condition for more than three of his five years.
* * *
Autism Screening For All Children To End MMR Fears
http://www.observer.co.uk/politics/story/0,6903,647878,00.html
[Kamal Ahmed and Gaby Hinsliff in the The Observer.]
All pre-school children are to be screened for autism
under plans being considered by the Government.
The move will finally allow a full investigation of the
causes of the condition and test any link with the measles, mumps and rubella
vaccine (MMR).
* * *
MMR - Your Questions Answered
http://www.observer.co.uk/focus/story/0,6903,647862,00.html
[By Anthony Browne in the The Observer.]
It is a potentially fatal disease caused by infection with
the measles virus. It is most common in children aged 1 to 4, but you can catch
it at any age. It is highly infectious, with 90 per cent of those who have not been
immunised catching it if they live in the same house as someone with measles.
* * *
‘This Is Just Not An Issue In France...’
http://www.observer.co.uk/focus/story/0,6903,647863,00.html
[Jon Henley in Paris for The Observer.]
My son Nathan was one last month and is, according to the
handy vaccination calendar sent to all parents by the French national health service,
due for the MMR jab. The shot is fully reimbursable, and while not compulsory
is ‘strongly recommended’.
* * *
MMR: A Policy In Meltdown
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/health/story.jsp?story=119244
[By Colin Brown.]
The Government’s embattled health department, embroiled in
a row over the safety of the MMR vaccine, suffered another blow yesterday when
it was disclosed that Britain faces widespread outbreaks of mumps among
thousands of teenagers who missed out on the triple vaccine.
* * *
[By Colin Brown.]
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/health/story.jsp?story=119241
Sir Liam Donaldson, the Chief Medical Officer, is
considering the extraordinary step of broadcasting a personal appeal on the MMR
vaccine, stressing the need for its take-up to avoid the threat of a measles epidemic.
* * *
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/asia-pacific/newsid_1808000/1808316.s
tm <- - address ends here.
Japan’s Health Ministry says the withdrawal of the MMR
vaccine for children did not cause an increase in deaths from measles.
It followed UK Prime Minister Tony Blair’s comments this
week in which he cited Japan as an example of the dangers of not having the
combined vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella.
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