Many parents may be aware of the recent controversy involving vaccines and autism. Dr. Andrew Wakefield and his research team published a 1998 paper in the medical journal The Lancet asserting that the Measles-Mumps-Rubella (MMR) vaccine was linked to a new abdominal syndrome involving autism. The paper examined 12 children, of whom 8 came down with this syndrome. Wakefield contended that giving three viruses to a child at one time was the cause of the problem, and that parents should consider giving the vaccinations on an individual basis, at intervals of one year over the course of three years.
There were conflicts over the study from the beginning. The majority of Wakefield’s peer editors at The Lancet did not want to publish the paper because they believed the conclusions were not supported by the small data set, or by the data itself. In 2004, a British newspaper published evidence showing that Wakefield had accepted research funds from a group of lawyers that was trying to build a case against the MMR vaccination and bring a lawsuit against the vaccine’s manufacturer. Several public health bodies including the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reviewed data for larger sample sizes and concluded that Wakefield’s interpretations did not hold up under scrutiny, and could not be reproduced in larger populations.
Doctors in disagreement with the Wakefield paper have expressed concerns that parents who are seeking solutions to poorly understood autism are susceptible to suggestions that offer any kind of certainty or explanation for the condition. Many say that a 2008 outbreak of measles can be attributed to a movement among parents to reject the use of vaccines, including MMR, for fear of giving autism to their children. As of January 2011, The Lancet has officially retracted the original paper, though many parents of autistic children continue to support the discredited hypothesis. Coming next: other controversies about autism and vaccines.
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