Our view on fighting disease: Vaccine fear-mongering endangers child health

When ‘herd immunity’ declines, deadly illnesses make a comeback.

Americans no longer routinely see people disfigured by smallpox or crippled by polio, so it's easy to forget what terrible scourges those diseases were before vaccination eradicated them here. Routine shots also nearly wiped out measles, a dangerous childhood illness that killed 450 and caused 4,000 cases of encephalitis annually in the USA before a vaccine became widely available in the mid-1960s.

But reported cases of measles, while still tiny, are now ticking upward, and the probable reason is troubling: Fearful parents are refusing to let their children be vaccinated against once-common childhood diseases. Anxiety — fanned by a discredited British researcher and misguided celebrities — has grown that childhood vaccines, chiefly the MMR vaccine (for measles, mumps and rubella), are a reason for an alarming spike in the number of children with autism, a disorder that impairs a child's social and communication skills, often severely.

No one should demean parents' fear of autism. A federal study released in December showed that about one in 110 children (and one in 70 boys) has been diagnosed with autism, up from one in 150 in a prior study. But the conviction that vaccines are the cause, despite convincing scientific proof that they're not, is turning into a dangerous threat to public health.

The supposed MMR-autism link got a huge boost with a controversial study published by the British medical journal The Lancet in 1998. Though the lead author, surgeon Andrew Wakefield, was careful to say no such link had been proved, the study strongly suggested the possibility.

Wakefield's research was widely reported, and the idea caught hold with worried parents. Child vaccination rates in Britain fell from 92% in 1995 to 81% in 2005, jeopardizing "herd immunity," in which enough children have been vaccinated that unvaccinated children rarely encounter pathogens.

Vaccine critics have also suggested that a mercury-based vaccine preservative called thimerasol is the link to autism. But research has shown almost identical autism rates in vaccinated and unvaccinated children, and autism rates continued to rise after thimerasol was removed from virtually all child vaccines in 2001.

Last month, Britain's medical regulatory body said Wakefield's conduct of the 1998 study had been "dishonest," "irresponsible" and "unethical." The Lancet retracted the study this month. Wakefield remains a hero to a passionate community of people who say the current vaccine regimen is unsafe. Though well-intentioned, their obsession with thimerasol and MMR has diverted attention from a search for likelier causes of autism.

Complications from inoculations are very rare but not unheard of. The notion that they should be avoided, however, is dangerous and can do real harm. During the recent swine flu epidemic, nearly one-fifth of those who didn't get vaccinated cited fears that the shot was harmful. Diseases such as measles, meanwhile, are now just a plane ride away. Infected travelers have come to this country and infected unvaccinated children.

Though U.S. child vaccination rates never fell as they did in Britain, and remain at 92%, a growing number of parents have "exempted" their children from the shots that are otherwise mandatory for attending school — more than 6% of children in California's Marin County, for example, or almost 27% of children in Washington's Ferry County.

It would be tragic if the current generation has to learn what their parents and grandparents knew from watching children get sick or die — that yesterday's diseases are still lurking, and that vaccines are most effective when virtually everyone gets them.

Posted at 12:22 AM/ET, February 16, 2010 in USA TODAY editorial

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Opposing view: 'Unjustly accused'

Medical industry seeks to suppress science to protect vaccine profits.

By Mark Blaxill

In George Orwell's dystopian novel 1984, a memorable scene follows the protagonist (working at the satirically named Ministry of Truth) as he rewrites the news to erase a man's life and work from history. That's what Richard Horton, editor of the British medical journal The Lancet, just attempted when he retracted a case series report by Dr. Andrew Wakefield and his colleagues at the Royal Free Hospital from the scientific record. Horton should be ashamed of himself, and anyone who believes in the free and open discussion of controversial scientific questions should be concerned about what has happened to our civil discourse in the process.

There's a lot of name-calling and misinformation swirling around this issue that should stop. Parents concerned about vaccine safety issues are branded "anti-vaccine." Dedicated scientists who simply reported a series of cases combining bowel symptoms, autistic regression and exposure to the MMR vaccine (measles, mumps and rubella) stand accused of fraud and misconduct. Meanwhile, the medical industry has dismissed concerns over exploding autism rates in a crusade to protect their policies and vaccine profits.

Anyone convinced that Wakefield is the problem should ask a simple question: Can you name a single instance of fraud or misconduct by Wakefield, describe it simply without deferring to the authority of some faceless tribunal and defend the evidence to an informed skeptic? You won't succeed. Why? Because the evidence clearly shows there was neither fraud nor misconduct. The parents whose children Wakefield studied never complained, and most have gone public with their support of Wakefield and his colleagues. Why wouldn't they? Their children were treated by Wakefield's colleagues, experts in pediatric gastroenterology, and the children's intestinal symptoms and symptoms of autism improved.

The Lancet parents are not alone. Thousands of parents all over the world — dedicated, educated parents of children with autism — have done their own scientific diligence and reached conclusions that differ from the media frenzy stoked up by government officials and the medical industry. They trust Wakefield and believe he and his colleagues stand unjustly accused. They also believe that scientific censorship is a pernicious thing and should stop. You should, too.

Mark Blaxill is editor-at-large for Age of Autism and a director of SafeMinds, which researches the role of mercury in autism.
Posted at 12:21 AM/ET, February 16, 2010 in USA TODAY editorial

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