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The New York Times reported this evening on a new investigative report published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), which found that Dr. Andrew Wakefield, the author of the first study purporting to link autism with the mumps, measles and rubella (MMR) vaccine, had falsified data about the children in question.
According to the report, although all 12 children in the study were reported as having been developmentally normal prior to receiving the MMR, 5 were found to have had developmental delay which preceded their vaccination.
Multiple studies have failed to find any correlation between the MMR vaccine and autism. Last year, Wakefield's study was officially retracted by The Lancet, where it was originally published, and Wakefield has since been barred from practicing medicine in his native England.
However, despite all this, many parents remain fearful of vaccinating their children and placing them at what they perceive as unnecessary risk. This has result in declining vaccination rates, and in periodic outbreaks and fatalities, even in countries with universal vaccination programs. In 2008, 164,000 people died from measles, an astonishingly high number when one considers how easily preventable those deaths were.
There are many reasons why people refuse to vaccinate their children. Included among them is a genuine mistrust some have of medical authority after seeing time and again how the miracle drug of one year (thalidomide, Vioxx) becomes the nightmare of the next.
In many ways, vaccinations have become victims of their own success. We no longer live in fear of terrifying epidemics sweeping through our neighborhoods, paralyzing and killing our loved ones and our neighbors. After reading Philip Roth's latest book "Nemesis" last weekend, which is set in Newark in 1944 during an especially vicious outbreak of polio, I commented to my mother how disturbing his description of this was. She, who was born in 1944 and grew up in New York, told me about the fear of polio that gripped her parents every summer in the pre-Salk era, and said that that was the main reason that her parents struggled financially to purchase a small cabin in the Catskills so that she and her siblings could be out of harm's way.
Spending two weeks in Haiti this past year in the aftermath of the earthquake, I witnessed two children (ages 11, 16) who died from diphtheria, another infectious disease easily preventable by vaccination. In the United States, there has not been a single case reported since 2003. In Haiti, where there is no vaccination program, it is endemic.
Watching those children die, and being powerless to save them despite the medical team's best efforts was infuriating, precisely because we all knew how easy it would have been to prevent them from getting sick in the first place.
It is my hope that people reading this will read the article in the Times or the full report in the BMJ, forward them on, and help people unsure about whether or not to vaccinate their children to do so. Thoughtfully balancing a very theoretical (and discredited) risk which has not been borne out by multiple studies, against the very real risks of the diseases themselves should lead to only one conclusion: to vaccinate unless there are clear medical contraindications.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/01/05/health/AP-EU-MED-Autism-Fraud.html?hp
http://www.bmj.com/content/342/bmj.c5347.full
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Dennis Rosen, M.D.
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