Quizzes & Puzzles1 min ago
Mmr Jab And The Non-Existent Link With Autism
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It would seem that there still some people that believe that there is a link between the MMR jab and autism. Why is this urban myth taking so long to die ?
It would seem that there still some people that believe that there is a link between the MMR jab and autism. Why is this urban myth taking so long to die ?
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I was involved in collating and submitting to the ASA information on the false claims made by the Childrens Immunisation Centre in the original information/advertising they offered on their website, so I am very pleased that the ASA upheld all 7 transgressions I documented. I was very angry at their blatant misrepresentation of the facts and the rather obvious way they were attempting to profit from the unease and even panic amongst parents following the panic in Wales earlier this summer.
As to why the myth and fear is so persistent - I am not entirely sure. In part it might be a distrust of government and science information, in part a genuine fear for some of the more considerate parents that they are complicit in subjecting their child to a positive harm, with potentially quite serious consequences, and therefore not participating in the vaccination schedule is better for their children. Also I think people view childhood diseases as somehow not especially dangerous, when of course they can be.
Couple that with a general lack of either interest or understanding in the science of vaccination, and this is what you get.
As to why the myth and fear is so persistent - I am not entirely sure. In part it might be a distrust of government and science information, in part a genuine fear for some of the more considerate parents that they are complicit in subjecting their child to a positive harm, with potentially quite serious consequences, and therefore not participating in the vaccination schedule is better for their children. Also I think people view childhood diseases as somehow not especially dangerous, when of course they can be.
Couple that with a general lack of either interest or understanding in the science of vaccination, and this is what you get.
I agree Eddie but those people must surely be a teeny-weeny minority.
Millions of children in Britain missed out on having proper jabs because their parents choose to believe highly questionable reports in the media rather than the advice of their own family Doctors. That is the part of this that I don't understand.
Millions of children in Britain missed out on having proper jabs because their parents choose to believe highly questionable reports in the media rather than the advice of their own family Doctors. That is the part of this that I don't understand.
@ Eddie Its estimated that around 1 million kids in the UK have either missed their MMR vaccination entirely or in part, and therefore are at risk themselves at and risk of transmitting the various viruses.
I have included a link to the best estimates. From the link
"Our best estimate indicates that there are approximately one third of a million 10-16 year-olds (around 8%) who are unvaccinated and another third of a million who need at least 1 further dose of MMR to give them full protection. It is also estimated that there are around another one third of a million children below and above this age band who need at least 1 further dose of MMR. The target population for this catch-up programme is therefore of the order of one million doses."
https:/
I have included a link to the best estimates. From the link
"Our best estimate indicates that there are approximately one third of a million 10-16 year-olds (around 8%) who are unvaccinated and another third of a million who need at least 1 further dose of MMR to give them full protection. It is also estimated that there are around another one third of a million children below and above this age band who need at least 1 further dose of MMR. The target population for this catch-up programme is therefore of the order of one million doses."
https:/
It's their age, I think. When they have their boosters it's about the age you start seeing the signs of autism. Some people relate one to the other because someone, wrongly, made the connection.
My kids school, if they haven't had 'all' the jabs they are not allowed on any school trips.
My youngest son still got mumps though.
My kids school, if they haven't had 'all' the jabs they are not allowed on any school trips.
My youngest son still got mumps though.
What I find difficult to understand is why these daft parents decided not to believe their family Doctors ?
I am a diabetic. If my Doctor tells me to take some tablets, I wouldn't dream of ignoring him and go looking in the tabloids for a solution instead. These parents ignored medical advice about a potentially serious health issue with their children...amazing !
I am a diabetic. If my Doctor tells me to take some tablets, I wouldn't dream of ignoring him and go looking in the tabloids for a solution instead. These parents ignored medical advice about a potentially serious health issue with their children...amazing !
mikey.....don't blame the public too much.......it is often difficult to understand what science really IS telling us.....one day one thing is harmful to eat and the very next year it is beneficial. Science and clinical medicine rather than a harmonious wedding have in many ways grown apart and terms like "properly conducted therapeutic trials" and "robust statistics" have become the mainstay of the statisticians i do not mean this in a derogatory fashion.
We are in the situation where many clinicians including myself do not understand the conclusions and rely on the verdict of the authors.Newspapers like the Daily Mail are often criticised on AB for their medical contents, but from where are they gleaned, ........from medical publications.
Andrew Wakefield was a Fellow of the Royal College of Pathologists, Fellow of the Royal college of Surgeons, qualified at St Mary's Hospital London, submitted a paper on MMR vaccine and autism to the Lancet and it was scrutinised and accepted for publication.
How more robust does one expect from the work of such a well qualified doctor?
I respect the posts of LazyGun and he always is a fair assessor of the facts in an academic sphere, but here the OPer has post a "human problem".....why is there still a lingering concern.
Tony Blair would not confirm the nature of his own son's vaccination details, the medical profession was at odds with one of it's highly qualified own. The media was only picking up upon the concern of the medical profession to an overdiagnosed (in my opinion) condition called Autism and the emotion, as it involved children, was growing.
Don't blame the public mikey.
I do not believe that there is a link between triple MMR vaccine and Autism.
We are in the situation where many clinicians including myself do not understand the conclusions and rely on the verdict of the authors.Newspapers like the Daily Mail are often criticised on AB for their medical contents, but from where are they gleaned, ........from medical publications.
Andrew Wakefield was a Fellow of the Royal College of Pathologists, Fellow of the Royal college of Surgeons, qualified at St Mary's Hospital London, submitted a paper on MMR vaccine and autism to the Lancet and it was scrutinised and accepted for publication.
How more robust does one expect from the work of such a well qualified doctor?
I respect the posts of LazyGun and he always is a fair assessor of the facts in an academic sphere, but here the OPer has post a "human problem".....why is there still a lingering concern.
Tony Blair would not confirm the nature of his own son's vaccination details, the medical profession was at odds with one of it's highly qualified own. The media was only picking up upon the concern of the medical profession to an overdiagnosed (in my opinion) condition called Autism and the emotion, as it involved children, was growing.
Don't blame the public mikey.
I do not believe that there is a link between triple MMR vaccine and Autism.
Sqad, the Daily Mail may get its stories from medical publications but the complaint is, I think, that they do not understand what those publications show or that they misrepresent what they show. When we, on here, go digging deeper than the Mail's copy writers, we are likely to find that 'a remote possibility' is translated into 'a real threat' or, toning it down a little, a headline of "Could X cause cancer?" followed by "A new study shows..." with no indication of the degree of risk, if any. This goes some way to explaining why the Mail says that one thing will cause Y yet a few weeks later is saying that the same thing will prevent Y.
And a lie will be half way around the world before Truth has got his boots on. A falsehood often appeals, and appearing first, is being accepted long before the truth emerges
And a lie will be half way around the world before Truth has got his boots on. A falsehood often appeals, and appearing first, is being accepted long before the truth emerges
here's the Mail's list of things that cause cancer
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I agree with Ummm. The symptoms often appear about the same age. However, it's odd how all those parents suddenly changed their minds when there was a measles epidemic!
I have 4 children who have had the MMR. The youngest one does have mild autism, but the symptoms were there from months before he had the vaccination. I know many people who still believe they're linked. But why doesn't it affect all of them, then?
I have 4 children who have had the MMR. The youngest one does have mild autism, but the symptoms were there from months before he had the vaccination. I know many people who still believe they're linked. But why doesn't it affect all of them, then?
That is true, bednobs. I did speak to the doctor about it when my youngest had MMR (was in the papers about that time) and said he had strange behaviour already, would he be ok with the vaccination. She told me about the Study and how unconvincing it was and went on to describe how she'd had to resuscitate a baby with measles four times. I went ahead with it.
Fred's post is mainly about News and the 'worried well', but the worried well do not go to their doctor and say - twenty y ago there was this article.....
This is a persistent meme - like halothane being pumped into caravans and then their sleeping occupants being robbed -
So you could say - it doesnt die because it persists (well that's not much help)
however there are independent sub-versions - DPT was a villain in the 70s, until there was an epidemic of pertussis in which five kids died.
and the Taliban shot the polio vaccinators didnt they
but did they whisper - very bad - urban myth as thye did so ?
This is a persistent meme - like halothane being pumped into caravans and then their sleeping occupants being robbed -
So you could say - it doesnt die because it persists (well that's not much help)
however there are independent sub-versions - DPT was a villain in the 70s, until there was an epidemic of pertussis in which five kids died.
and the Taliban shot the polio vaccinators didnt they
but did they whisper - very bad - urban myth as thye did so ?
Mikey4444
Please see this timeline.
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The Daily Mail campaign again the jab started in 2001 and was only fully discreditted in 2010. But people still believe there is a danger. The Government have been campaigning to get parents to immunise theor children, but all those years of bad information in the papers have sowed a seed of doubt. It is only now, when people are dying, that parents are taking notice again.
Please see this timeline.
http://
The Daily Mail campaign again the jab started in 2001 and was only fully discreditted in 2010. But people still believe there is a danger. The Government have been campaigning to get parents to immunise theor children, but all those years of bad information in the papers have sowed a seed of doubt. It is only now, when people are dying, that parents are taking notice again.
Despite the link being proven to be incorrect in 2010, The Daily Mail continues to print stories as though the link does cause autism. This example from a year ago...
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@Sqad I am human too. I can appreciate the human angle,Sqad :)
I can understand the panic caused in parents at the time by Wakefields paper and the subsequent panicky over-hyping in the media.
This is a problem. No one took any time to look seriously at the data that Wakefield was submitting, with a few honourable exceptions. Even the Lancet did not do its usual thorough peer review. Quite why such a scare was created on the back of a case study involving just 12 kids and Wakefields unevidenced speculations is beyond me. I do wonder if it was at all primed by the previous BSE scare - peoples lack of trust in Government scientific/medical advice, which had preceded Wakefields paper and would still have been fresh in the publics mind.
Of course, with hindsight and the diligent work of Brian Deere, the Times Journalist, it is now apparent that Wakefields case study was an unethical sham. He failed to gain ethics committee approval at the Royal Free Hospital for his study. The laboratory where he sent his work for DNA analysis was both sloppy and error-strewn. Most of the alleged co-authors did not actually contribute anything much to the study at all - in itself a pretty damning indictment of the desire to get publishing credit. And he had a financial interest in discrediting the MMR vaccination - he stood to gain from a measles jab he had designed/patented, as well as being paid a lot of money from a lawyer seeking to generate a class action suite in the US against the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.
And all his co-authors retracted their names from the paper. The Lancet took the unusual step of retro-actively pulling the story and wrote an apologetic editorial. Wakefield was struck off by the GMC. And to this day, there is no additional studies or trials of evidence to support Wakefields original supposition, despite various properly conducted trials designed to look into it.
I can understand the panic caused in parents at the time by Wakefields paper and the subsequent panicky over-hyping in the media.
This is a problem. No one took any time to look seriously at the data that Wakefield was submitting, with a few honourable exceptions. Even the Lancet did not do its usual thorough peer review. Quite why such a scare was created on the back of a case study involving just 12 kids and Wakefields unevidenced speculations is beyond me. I do wonder if it was at all primed by the previous BSE scare - peoples lack of trust in Government scientific/medical advice, which had preceded Wakefields paper and would still have been fresh in the publics mind.
Of course, with hindsight and the diligent work of Brian Deere, the Times Journalist, it is now apparent that Wakefields case study was an unethical sham. He failed to gain ethics committee approval at the Royal Free Hospital for his study. The laboratory where he sent his work for DNA analysis was both sloppy and error-strewn. Most of the alleged co-authors did not actually contribute anything much to the study at all - in itself a pretty damning indictment of the desire to get publishing credit. And he had a financial interest in discrediting the MMR vaccination - he stood to gain from a measles jab he had designed/patented, as well as being paid a lot of money from a lawyer seeking to generate a class action suite in the US against the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.
And all his co-authors retracted their names from the paper. The Lancet took the unusual step of retro-actively pulling the story and wrote an apologetic editorial. Wakefield was struck off by the GMC. And to this day, there is no additional studies or trials of evidence to support Wakefields original supposition, despite various properly conducted trials designed to look into it.
For those interested, this is the ASAs findings and verdict in full.
http://
http://
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