.. to be really hacked off with my Mum over vaccinations

[MrsTwinks]

Me and DH are TTC. A passing comment from a relative about my mum and doctors got me thinking about my jabs so thought I'd better get my rubella checked.

Just back from the doctor and it turns out all vaccinations on me stopped when I was about 2. Everything. Now IIRC 1988 was pre the MMR scare, but even so I could understand that, except its all of them. They have recommended I have a polio and tetanus now, but I'm also missing BCG etc.

AIBU to be really fucked off at my mum for a)kinda for just doing it to start with but honestly really b) never bloody telling me!!

I work with kids, shes been on at me to TTC for literally years, and not once has she mentioned me not having had my jabs. The tetanus one really fucks me off too because as a teen I cut my leg open really badly on rusty metal, it got infected so bad even the holes from the stitches got all infected and she didn't let/make sure I had a tetanus booster. I suspect also she never told my Dad because he went ape when I nearly didn't have my meningitis c when I was 17. He was a SAHP with me at first as he was a student so I wonder if maybe it was only him who took me in the first place.

I'm still really mad 'cos I ust discovered it ontop of alot of other stuff she did but now its like she coulda been playing russian roulette with not only my health as a child but my kid's if I hadnt thought to check it iykwim.

and breathe

Well yes it is kind of weird not to realise you haven't had bcg as we all talked about it. Thirty years later I can still tell you that my best friend at a different school had it a few weeks before me

I had mine as a toddler or at least as a very young child, some time in the late 60s in Ireland. I would never know that unless I had been told.

Assuming the op is british though..... Bcg when given as a mass immunisation was given as a teenager. It was a big thing to talk about especially as you had the pin prick test initially to see whether you needed it which everyone compared to see who reacted. I do agree with gotart that it would be strange in the uk to have completely missed that. Perhaps she's Irish.

Lol. Oh well it was nice to catch up on the latest thinking on pertussis.

Yuu didn't answer my question . . .

LeonieDelt You clearly have your own reasons for not wanting to vaccinate your children, I understand that, but do you really not see any benefit in them at all? Bunbaker says "How do you think smallpox was eradicated? Why do you think that polio is virtually unheard of in this country?" . . . Do you not see the benefit there?

My own grandmother lost a least one sibling (some relations tell me it was more) to a disease which is these days vaccinated against. It was so common then. If there were no such thing as vaccines that would still be happening all the time. Would you rather that?

bruffin, 2 minutes googling does indeed lead one to the fact that mmr uptake rates peaked in 1996.

in what way is that not before Wakefield's 1998 paper?

(source, once again, not whale. I don't htink I have ever linked ot anything from whale)

add in to that the fact that, at that time single jabs were available as a choice on the nhs, and some parents were opting for them, but this data was not recorded separately - so the real figures will not ever be known.

little misleading though. They did peak, yes, but they had been fairly steady in the years before, small dips are normal. But then there was the steep decline in, hmm, when was it...1998-1999!
What a strange coincidence.

Not sure where you have got your figures from as you can see from both the link I gave that the MMR did not peak at 1996 it was level until 1997/8. So please link to where you got your information.
There are at least two links on here to show that my figures are correct.
HPA figure went from 92% in 97 to 88% in 98

Thes are from the who link I gave above going backwards from 2010

EUR GBR United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (the) MCV 93 86 86 86 85 82 81 82 85 85 88 88 87 91 92 92 92 92 92 90 89 84 76 76 71 62 58 55 52

As you can see after the initial rise it was a steady rise from 1980 until 1990 then level from then until 1997 then downwards from 1998 onwards.

And yes a lot of your quotes can be linked back to whale.

Oh interesting, so even pre-Wakefield they didn't manage the 95% cover they go on about needing.

Also interesting that despite the massive amount of publicity they still haven't managed to get the cover back up to 90%

I've always thought they would have had more success if they'd admitted that MMR may have triggered small numbers of autism cases (whether via Wakefield's model, or some other). Rather than coming out with all that nonsense about autism rates and MMR and blah blah - when anyone reading for 2 minutes could pick huge holes in their arguments.

My MMR history goes like this. Friend with child 3 months older than DS1 rings me (2001) and asks whether it's safe. I say 'yes of course the scare is all blown out of proportion, measles nasty disease etc etc'. DS1 gets invited for vaccination, I decide to read a little bit. Read Wakefield saying something or other - can't even remember what. Read something from some govt dept (HPA? perhaps), completely misquoting him. Read original paper, then some rather far fetched interpretation of said paper from someone official. Begin to wonder why on earth they're being deliberately misleading. Read more and find that what I'm reading and what Wakefield is saying is being misquoted again and again and and again. Find that papers being held up as 'proving' Wakefield's hypothesis as incorrect (eg Taylor et al 1999) do nothing of the sort - in fact even say within the paper that they're not ruling out a rare idiosyncratic response- er which is what we're talking about? No? Find myself shrieking at the TV as yet again some dept of health automaton is wheeled out to talk about autism rates, when the overall autism rate is complete irrelevant. The politicians STILL go on about factors leading to the rise in autism today when it's been known for years it's not one thing and almost certainly has multiple triggers and pathways.

This was before I had any suspicion about autism in ds1. At that time I would have believed what they were saying had it actually tied in with what I could read with my own eyes, or listen to with my own ears. I decided that they either didn't understand what Wakefield was saying or they were being deliberately misleading and I didn't trust a word they were saying. So I arranged for singles. He has a single measles jab with a private GP, - the others were arranged and paid for and he then regressed so we halted any vaccinations whilst the regression was ongoing.

Our decision not to vaccinate was actually nothing to do with Wakefield, but everything to do with the official line being so obviously misleading. I stated my reading knowing about the scare, and thinking that whether he was right or wrong the risks would probably still be higher from measles itself. I wanted to vaccinate, and tbh I wanted a free vaccination. Had the information from the dept of health been accurate I would have vaccinated and those 2001 figures would have had one more jab uptake. I just felt I couldn't as I was being lied to.

And I suppose if you add single vaccine figures into those quoted on the website the overall rate of coverage for measles and rubella at least may well be higher than pre-Wakefield days.

We don't actually know what measles coverage is because the single vaccine figures are never provided.

BTW I have a letter here from some dept of health bod written in about 2001 - cba to dig it out right now, and he says the reason the single vaccines are not licensed is because the vaccine companies made no request to have them re-licensed when their then licenses expired. And that if they made an application for the licenses to be renewed then it would go through normal channels. (I had written asking why - as reported everywhere at the time - their licenses had been withdrawn. They haven't he said, the companies haven't applied). Always found that really quite interesting - and very at odds with what was being spouted on the news etc at the time.

He also says in that letter that a rare idiosyncratic response can never be ruled out. Which is sort of the bit I was interested in. Really.

Saintly Have you put your research together into a paper or letter to a journal?

It'd be interesting to see the reaction

We don't know but the fact that singles were done actually did put more children at risk. Wakefield said there should be year between vaccines. Therefore leaving more and more children open to the disease. There is no getting away from the fact that as the number of children vaccinated against mmr went down cases of measles went up leading to the epidemic in europe over the last few years, and introducing Measles back into the US after it had been eliminated.
There was nothing to suggest that single vaccines were safer at all. The fact that Wakefield had already patented a single vaccine must be highly relevent to that fact he suggested single vaccines at the press conference.

Why would they admit things that aren't true, to make you feel a bit better about it?

Use a little common sense when critically appraising the story. Man with undisclosed financial interest in single vaccines creates mass panic stating that mmr is dangerous, instead recommending single vaccines. Not that difficult to see why said man isn't seen as very reliable source.

Nothing can ever be totally ruled out. Thats whats known in the trade as the scientific method. It doesn't mean it must be true though.

Outbreaks in the states have been in 100% vaccinated populations so I think it's a little unfair to blame Wakefield.

There's no point Pakdooik. It's unpublishable in mainstream journals. In the same way the only way to really find out what a researcher thinks about how vaccines might fit into their model is to ask them direct (they'll tell you, but it won't make it into the published paper).

Wakefield actually patented a treatment for the type of gut disease he was seeing (remember he was working on wild measles and crohn's disease long before MMR) . (Any money raised from the patent would not have gone to him but into a Royal Free trust). Read the original patent. He does mention it's possibility of being used a single vaccine alternative (which would be normal in a patent application - to list all potential uses) but the whole focus is on the application being for something to treat autistic enterocolitis.

That's exactly the sort of misinformation I'm talking about.

Oh that's a shame. Deer used to provide the whole patent on his website so you could read what was actually submitted. He now only provides a highly edited version.

I DID write to Deer and ask why he kept saying the patent application was for a single vaccine when it was very clear it was for a treatment for autistic enterocolitis. He didn't reply, so I can't answer that.

I think you are wrong about outbreaks in the US and 100% vaccinated populations. Such a thing does not exist, for starters.

"Also interesting that despite the massive amount of publicity they still haven't managed to get the cover back up to 90%"

But you always get that regardless of what the scare story is about, whether it is vaccines, the pill or certain types of food. Scaremongering like this always creates doubt, even if it has been disproved.

When my sister had my nephew the staff at the hospital asked if he was a "pill scare baby"!!!. (Apparently 9 months previously there had been a pill scare story in the papers, and the hospital at that time was inundated with women having babies). My sister said that he was planned and wasn't stupid enough to believe anything published by the tabloids.

"Outbreaks in the states have been in 100% vaccinated populations so I think it's a little unfair to blame Wakefield. "

Not true.

No sorry it was 98%.

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1405017/

I did read a paper about an outbreak in 100% vaccinated college but that might have been mumps. Have to work now s can't search.

that study recommends MORE vaccinations, not less. Whats your point?

Changey - well the outbreak above was in a 98% vaccinated population.

This official looking source of information suggests that outbreaks are (1) due to insufficient vaccination (not always linked to vaccine refusal) and (2) waning vaccine immunity.

It's a bit simplistic to blame Wakefield for every outbreak. Especially as he said that a) he advised vaccination against measles and b) his own children had had MMR.

So if people aren't vaccinating they're not following Wakefield's advice.

My point in the above really is that a) we don't know measles vaccination rates as the missing data on single vaccines is a big hole in the information and b) that the government response (which was something like 'impossible for a child to be damaged by MMR ever full stop') was very damaging. It was the government response that made me stall, not Wakefield. You may not agree with that, but I am reporting it as it happened. I was all set to give MMR, post the news conference, until I read the original research, what had been said and the official interpretation and response to it All they had to say was 'any vaccine carries a small risk and we are monitoring the situation' and I would probably have gone ahead. It was the reluctance to even say that that made me stall.

And at the time I didn't even know I had a severely autistic child. I had no agenda.