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The government and medical establishment have only themselves to blame for
the reports last weekend of an "alarming" and "dangerous"
drop in the take-up of the MMR vaccine.
The BSE scandal is still too fresh in everybody's mind for the public to
accept that something is safe just because government scientific and health
advisers and an expensive advertising campaign say it is.
Last month's Medical Research Council (MRC) review of autism, which again
declared that there was no evidence to support a link between the triple jab
and autism, is just more of the same. In fact no has yet said there
<italic>is</italic> a definite link. What Dr Andrew Wakefield and
now other researchers here and abroad have uncovered is the
<italic>possibility</italic> of link. The response of the medical
establishment has been to force Wakefield out of his job rather than
undertake meaningful research which might prove him wrong - for example, by
initiating an international study comparing vaccinated with unvaccinated
childre. Nor does the MRC report recommend such a study.
Given public alarm in Britain, fuelled by the Blair family's claims to
privacy, another major disappointment is the MRC paper's failure to recommend
proper monitoring and recording of autism rates in the UK. It suggests, from
what figures are available, that the rate among children is now one in every
166. That is a huge leap from the official figure published in the
<italic>Oxford Textbook of Psychiatry</italic> in 1988, which
suggested the figure was one per 2,200 of the population.
What the MRC paper does suggest is that methodological differences between
studies, changes in diagnostic practice and public and professional awareness
are likely causes of the apparent increase. This begs a question, if
diagnosis is better, why hasn't a huge increase in diagnosis in the adult
population also been noticed or recorded? The report states only that the
prevalence in the adult population is "not known", but doesn't
suggest we find it out.
Yet in Shetland and the Scottish isles, for example, every diagnosed autistic
child is now aged 13 or under. In fact in some areas where autism rates have
been monitored, the figures are even more alarming. Cambridge researchers
have found one autistic child per 100. A similar figure emerges from the
local education authority in East Surry. Among boys the figure rises to one
in 69.
Similar increases are reported in Europe: in Sweden, one in 141 in children
with IQs of over 70; in Finland a four-fold increase from 1979 to 1994 among
five to seven year olds. In the US, New Jersey reports an increase of 876
percent in eight years. Illinois a 627 percent increase in six years and a
1,200 percent increase in Miami.
Can this explosion - one US researcher, Edward Yazbak, now refers to it as
"a silent epidemic" - really simply be better diagnosis? Or is it,
as more and more scientists appear to believe, the result of some kind of
external trigger or triggers perhaps acting on a genetic predisposition:
exposure to drugs, viral infection, heavy metals... or MMR vaccine.
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