The Sunday Times - Britain

June 23, 2002

Stars join Hornby in MMR crusade

by Adam Nathan and Rosie Waterhouse

ONE of Britain’s leading authors and several Hollywood stars have grouped together to fund research into possible links between the MMR vaccine and the reported rise in the incidence of autism.

Nick Hornby, whose books Fever Pitch and High Fidelity won him international fame, has given £11,000 to the British charity Visceral, which is funding research into the controversial triple jab.

The author, who has an autistic eight-year-old son, has been joined by film stars including John Travolta, Clint Eastwood, Denzel Washington and Bruce Willis.

Travolta, the star of Pulp Fiction and Saturday Night Fever, and his wife Kelly Preston helped to raise more than £30,000 for Visceral through a sponsored walk and a dinner in Florida last September by the Autism Autoimmunity Project. His Hollywood colleagues donated signed pictures of themselves that were auctioned at similar events, raising £15,000.

Visceral is investigating alleged links between the MMR vaccine, which gives protection against measles, mumps and rubella, and autism.

The reported incidence of autism has risen sharply in the West in recent years, with 60 out of every 10,000 children under eight in Britain now being diagnosed with an “autistic spectrum disorder”.

While some experts argue that it is changes in the definition of autism to include people with quite mild learning difficulties that has led to the increase, others suspect the measles component of the MMR vaccine.

Visceral’s medical director is Dr Andrew Wakefield, the British consultant who, in a paper published in The Lancet in 1998, first suggested an association between MMR, bowel disorders and autism. Vilified for his work at the Royal Free hospital in London, Wakefield now lives in America where autism has become the latest cause to be taken up by Hollywood.

Last week Wakefield presented a paper to a congressional hearing in Washington that he claimed supported a link between MMR and autism. The research by his colleague Dr John O’Leary, professor of pathology at Trinity College Dublin, was part-funded by Visceral and covered 12 children. It suggests that the same measles strain used in the MMR vaccine is present in the gut of some autistic children.

The hearing was examining whether the MMR jab and the presence of mercury in some vaccines may be to blame. Dr Arthur Krigsman, a paediatric gastro-intestinal consultant at Lenox Hill hospital, New York, told the hearing he had conducted tests on 43 autistic children and found 90% of them had the same inflammatory bowel diseases as Wakefield reported in children he examined at the Royal Free hospital in London four years ago.

His findings are significant because they are the first independent corroboration of much of Wakefield’s work.

However, the Dublin research by O’Leary has been rapidly dismissed by an expert from the World Health Organisation. He claimed that the technique used by O’Leary was flawed.

The Department of Health vigorously denies any link between the MMR jab and autism. It points to a study published in the British Medical Journal two weeks ago which reviewed all published evidence and concluded that there was no link.

The department also points out that concern about MMR has led to falling take-up rates of the vaccine, which has led to several potentially fatal outbreaks of measles.

Visceral said last week that fundraising would continue. Robert Sawyer, its chief executive, confirmed that US money had been the key to the continuation of Wakefield’s work.

In September, Medical Interventions for Autism, an American charity that funds Visceral, will stage a celebrity golf tournament with the Detroit Red Wings, the champion ice-hockey team, which it hopes will raise more than £300,000.

The charity plans to raise more than £5m to research the effects of MMR on the brain over the next three years. To achieve this it is targeting celebrities known for their support of children’s illnesses.

For example, Neil Young, the rock star whose son suffers from cerebral palsy, has been approached to stage a charity concert in Chicago next year that could raise £200,000. Autism campaigners hope that Young’s most famous song, The Needle and the Damage Done, could become their anthem. However, Young has not yet agreed to the concert.

Hornby could not be contacted for comment on his donation to Visceral. Virginia Bovell, the author’s former wife, is a close friend of Lyndsey Booth, Cherie Blair’s sister and a former lawyer who now works as a homeopath and is a campaigner for the rights of autistic children.

Tony Blair stoked rumours last year that his youngest son, Leo, had not had the MMR jab by refusing to confirm — on grounds of privacy — that he had.  This further fuelled public anxiety over the safety of the triple vaccine.