measles vaccine link to autism totally discredited...

[Mike70]

this is a disgusting story that really pisses me off. let's just say that heads (and hopefully soon medical licenses) are going to roll.


Among the dozens of charges the GMC deemed proven against Wakefield are that he provided a research proposal to a lawyer seeking to sue vaccine manufacturers for causing autism. This study, if it found that the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine could cause autism in children, would greatly assist the lawyer in supporting his argument. With financial backing from a source that represented the ultimate conflict of interest, the study was carried out. Wakefield had previously conducted research that potentially implicated that the MMR was a causal factor in Crohn's disease but this research was not validated. This new take on the "dangers" of MMR proved to be financially lucrative for Wakefield but may eventually lead to his losing his medical license later this year when the GMC decides on what sanction should follow from this misconduct.

Regardless of Wakefield's unethical conduct, is there evidence that supports this hypothesis? A study published in Pediatrics attempted to determine whether measles was more likely to found in the bodies of children with ASDs than in typically developing children. D'Souza and colleagues (2006) collected the largest sample of subjects for this type of study and used the same technique, polymerase chain reaction assays, that had purportedly detected measles in children with ASDs. They found that this technique produced many positive reactions in both children with ASDs and typical children. However, these reactions were further analyzed and found to be false positives for all subjects. The products of the reactions were cloned and genetically sequenced and none of these sequences contained the components of the measles virus. That is, neither the children with ASDs nor the typical children showed any evidence of measles virus in their bodies. Furthermore, there were no differences found in anti-measles antibodies across the study groups of children.

This, taken in combination with numerous other studies showing no relation between the MMR vaccine and ASDs, provides fairly definitive evidence against the "MMR causes autism" hypothesis. Wakefield was found by Brian Deer to have been paid a great deal by this group seeking to pursue litigation against vaccine manufacturers in the United Kingdom.

man, how sad that this fool has caused thousands of children to suffer through the measles because their parents were fearful of the vaccine causing autism. it is also sad that there were "celebrities" like jenny mccarthy who jumped on this bandwagon of idiocy and actually encouraged parents not to get their children vaccinated.

andrew wakefield ought to be put in the stocks and have bags full of rhino shit thrown at him for about a month.

the moral of this story? do not believe things simply because they are presented in a single research study that "proves" a link between things. people already have far too much faith in that sort of crap. many times, as in this very case, further research will cast serious doubt on the original findings or even discredit them entirely.
full article:

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/radical-behaviorist/201001/dishonest-discredited-and-absent-wakefield-is-thoughtless-home


here is the retraction by "the lancet." i will post the text but not a link because you have to be a member of the lancet to view the retraction.


Following the judgment of the UK General Medical Council's Fitness to Practise Panel on Jan 28, 2010, it has become clear that several elements of the 1998 paper by Wakefield et al1 are incorrect, contrary to the findings of an earlier investigation.2 In particular, the claims in the original paper that children were "consecutively referred" and that investigations were "approved" by the local ethics committee have been proven to be false. Therefore we fully retract this paper from the published record.

[krakenslayer]

The doctor who runs the Bad Science site has been claiming exactly this for years. Bet he feels vindicated now.

What is frustrating is that there are still pressure groups, composed of parents of Autistic children, campaigning against the vaccine, based on nothing but discredited research and anecdotes. I guess it helps emotionally when you can pin the blame on a bugbear like "big pharma" as opposed to dealing with the fact that tragic shit sometimes just happens. I can kind of understand and sympathise with their situation, but when you are dealing with a vaccine that could save people's lives, then it's a serious issue.

Also saddening is that this sort of thing will inevitably hurt the reputation of medical research in general. IMO, the problem is 95% due to the way in which the press reports such findings - when was the last time you heard of a journalist investigating the soundness of a scientific paper's research methods, or looking in detail into opposing scientific arguments? This is how scientific research is meant to be taken in context, but the press usually just go: "A new study suggests blah blah blah" and give the impression that it's suddenly a new consensus, when it might not be more than one man's findings.

[Mike70]

Also saddening is that this sort of thing will inevitably hurt the reputation of medical research in general. IMO, the problem is 95% due to the way in which the press reports such findings - when was the last time you heard of a journalist investigating the soundness of a scientific paper's research methods, or looking in detail into opposing scientific arguments? This is how scientific research is meant to be taken in context, but the press usually just go: "A new study suggests blah blah blah" and give the impression that it's suddenly a new consensus, when it might not be more than one man's findings.

journalists hardly ever do such things when it comes to science. like you said, they simply report on the research as if it was all rock solid fact.

like the dude who runs bad science, i've been extremely dubious of this study (in fact, i have posted about this subject here before) since i first read it on the lancet. some of the research was done on study groups as small as 12 children. those are not numbers that would allow you make the grand sweeping statements that wakefield was asserting.

it is esp. ridiculous when in 2002, the danish govt. conducted a study on all 537, 303 children born in denmark between 1991 and 1998 and found absolutely no link between vaccination and autism.

so, you combine unethical, corrupted research with a media who reports such things as fact and throw in the high level of scientific illiteracy that most folks have and you get sad situations like this.

this whole subject rankles me because i feel quite strongly that parents who do not get their kids vaccinated are acting in a completely irresponsible manner; are potentially exposing their kids to damaging and even fatal illnesses that the child need not be exposed to, and ought to all be ashamed of themselves.

[blind2d]

This highlights two main problems with the common brain of the American citizen: that need to pin the blame on something (anything!) rather than just farkin' dealing with it; and blind faith in whatever someone else says is true, rather than using one's own mind and researching extensively something important. I mean, when you think about it, measles and Autism are completely unrelated! (other than they're both things.... that affect humans) Why would an intravenous injection of chemicals affect a genetic mental condition? It just doesn't add up. Very similar to the whole Scientology thing, if you look at the facts. We are so lost. Is there hope? Do we deserve a second chance? Most would probably say yes... but why? What is there to gain? I'm sorry, I'm a little melancholic right now... where's that Prozac?

[Mike70]

well krackers, the dude from bad science certainly laid this whole sad story out.


As the GMC have also found, these children were subjected to a programme of unpleasant and invasive tests which were not performed in their own clinical interest, but rather for research purposes, and these tests were conducted without ethics committee approval.

These tests were hardly trivial: they included colonoscopy, where the child is sedated, and a long tube with a camera and a light passed through the anus and deep into the bowell; lumbar puncture, where a needle is placed into the spine to get cerebrospinal fluid; barium meals and more. It’s plainly undesirable for doctors to go around conducting tests like these on children for their own research interests without very careful external scrutiny.

disgusting, totally and completely disgusting.


But there is the wider context: Wakefield was at the centre of a media storm about the MMR vaccine, and is now being blamed by journalists as if he were the only one at fault. In reality, the media are equally guilty.

Even if it had been immaculately well conducted – and it certainly wasn’t – Wakefield’s “case series report” of 12 children’s clinical anecdotes would never have justified the conclusion that MMR causes autism, despite what journalists claimed: it simply didn’t have big enough numbers to do so. But the media repeatedly reported the concerns of this one man, generally without giving methodological details of the research, either because they found it too complicated, inexplicably, or because to do so would have undermined their story.

As the years passed by, media coverage deteriorated further. Claims by researchers who never published scientific papers to back up their claims were reported in the newspapers as important new scientific breakthroughs, while at the very same time, evidence showing no link between MMR and autism, fully published in peer reviewed academic journals, was simply ignored. This was cynical, and unforgivable.

word. the media jumped on this train of fools and rode it straight to the station to the detriment of children everywhere just because it was one of those "hot button" stories that got a lot of attention. the media, in this case, preferred the theories of crackpots, many of whom had never published anything. information that didn't feed into this shitstorm of idiocy was simply ignored.

i still cannot believe that anyone with even half a brain would fall for a "study" done on 12 children. unbelievable.