Your child next?

[Guest guest]

I am really not sure where this man has left his intelligence or common

sense....

Is he accurate in saying that the MMR is only under question in the UK? I

thought other countries also had severe reservations...?

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7-2118360,00.html

Your child next?

By Nigel Hawkes

As measles claims a teenage boy's life, public health professionals fear a

new outbreak becasue parents were panicked into rejecting MMR

Measles is back: not in regiments, but in numbers sufficient to send a

shiver down many parents’ spines. There have been more confirmed cases of

the disease in the first three months of the year than in the whole of 2005.

One boy has died, the first measles death since 1992. Nine have needed

hospital treatment.

Outbreaks started in the travelling community, and spread. In Doncaster,

where there had not been a case of measles in the past 12 years, 36 children

are affected. Six children in Chatham, Kent, have measles, and two have

needed hospital treatment. And six nurses at the Central Middlesex Hospital

in northwest London have gone down with the infection after looking after an

ill child.

These, of course, are nothing like the numbers who used to catch measles,

once a childhood rite of passage along with mumps and chickenpox. But today

there is no excuse for any case of measles in a child younger than 18

because there is a vaccine, offered routinely to all children since 1988,

that protects against it: MMR.

Today’s measles cases, which have the potential to grow into something much

worse, are appearing because parents were frightened by bad science, and

worse journalism, into refusing to have their children vaccinated.

The scare that linked MMR to autism was a personal crusade by a single

doctor, Dr Wakefield, based on inadequate evidence and backed by

millions of pounds of public money, pumped in by the Legal Aid Board over

nine years as it supported a case brought by parents against the vaccine

manufacturers.

Almost everybody involved now admits they were wrong: The Lancet, which

published Wakefield’s paper that triggered the panic; his colleagues at the

Royal Free Hospital in London, who allowed him to turn it into a campaign;

and the Legal Services Commission, which funded a “fishing expedition” for

evidence. It admitted at the end of 2003 that “in retrospect, it was not

effective or appropriate for the LSC to fund research”. Never mind the “in

retrospect”: it was never appropriate.

Only Dr Wakefield, who now presents himself as a victim, seems unrepentant,

together with the journalists who backed him. But the true victims are the

children who find themselves suffering an avoidable disease as a result of

their activities.

It cannot be said often enough that MMR is safe, and has always been safe. A

large number of studies attest to that. Simon Murch, one of Wakefield’s

co-authors, said: “No other vaccine has ever been studied in such depth and

the evidence for its overall safety is comprehensive.”

No other country shared the panic over MMR. It was made in Britain,

flourished here and, thank heavens, never spread. But it always had the

potential to do enormous damage. The mystery is why so many parents were

persuaded to believe that MMR caused autism or, more implausibly still, that

single vaccines for measles, mumps and rubella would be safer for their

children than the triple MMR vaccine. There was never even a shred of

evidence for this contention.

The MMR scare is a classic example of how confidence in science is being

lost in Britain. For lack of timely defenders, and because even rational

people are deaf to reassurances in the wake of the BSE affair, MMR became a

fearful symbol of overbearing medical authority.

Weeping parents with autistic children were paraded as if they constituted

evidence. Middle-class columnists took up the theme with gusto, combining —

as Dr Fitzpatrick, a London GP, puts it — “a high level of emotional

engagement but no specialist knowledge of the subject”. To watch this

happening and be powerless to stop it made me angrier than anything else I

can remember in 40 years of journalism.

Sometimes, journalists need to be reminded that what they write can have

consequences. Those of us old enough to remember the whooping-cough affair

of the 1970s should have been, in a sense, inoculated against the error.

That time, a false link between whooping-cough vaccine and brain damage

caused a flight from the vaccine, a whooping-cough epidemic, and around 100

deaths.

So far, the resurgence of measles is on nothing like so alarming a scale,

but the cause is the same. Of the first 72 cases confirmed this year by the

Health Protection Agency, the vast majority had no vaccinations at all —

hardly surprising, as at the height of the scare MMR uptake fell in some

areas to less than 80 per cent, leaving a vast number of unvaccinated

children and teenagers to act as tinder for the outbreaks.

Two among the 72 cases had had a single MMR jab, but not the follow-up

necessary for full protection; and three had had single jabs, two of them in

South Africa. It is hardly surprising that they were not adequately

protected.

The whole point of the triple vaccine is that it minimises the number of

times mothers have to take their babies to be vaccinated, and increases the

chances that they will be fully protected. Middle-class mums who recommended

single vaccinations took no account of the fact that this would mean six

visits to the clinic instead of two, multiplying the risk that many babies —

especially those of hard-pressed working-class mothers — would never

complete the course. Clinics offering single vaccinations did super

business, though: it’s an ill wind that doesn’t blow somebody some good.

How much should we worry about the outbreaks? The issue is whether there are

sufficient numbers of unvaccinated children to enable the disease to spread.

For complete protection, the World Health Organisation recommends a vaccine

uptake of 95 per cent. The UK is significantly below that, at around 83 per

cent, but there are pockets — in London in particular — where it has fallen

much lower. Dr Ann Marie Connolly, area health director for Haringey, where

the nurses have fallen ill, gives a bleak warning: “We run the risk of high

outbreaks of measles and its developments — pneumonia, long term

brain-damage, and even death.”

Talking of the Chatham cases, Dr Mathi Chandrakumar, director of Kent Health

Protection Agency, said: “I am concerned this is the beginning of a wider

outbreak of measles in Kent.” The Health Protection Agency said: “The agency

has warned over the last few years that outbreaks are likely in areas where

uptake has been low and particularly when it has been low for longer periods

of time.”

Fortunately, MMR uptake has shown signs of increasing, though a computer

glitch in several London primary care trusts has prevented full figures

being published for the past year. We may yet escape without cases rising

into the thousands. If we do, it will be thanks to the public health

profession, and not the one to which I belong and of which, every time I

think of MMR, I feel ashamed.