To think Andrew Wakefield has blood on his hands for causing so much distrust over the MMR?

[chicaguapa]

That's it really. He's caused so much damage with his stupid little study. It was years ago, he was struck off, the study was discredited, but people still don't get the MMR because of it.

Why ask what their vaccine status is if it would not have any influence on diagnosis? Why is it relevant?

magdelen do you think you could hold off the sarcasm?

bruffin am not armchair expert but mother of vaccine damaged child (not mmr)

seeker am posting as spending hours doing nothing while dd sleeps and we wait for test results. sorry to inconvenience you

I don't think anyone has to prove to anyone that there are sometimes side effects and complications, sometimes devastating ones, from vaccines.

And that compensation should be paid to people who suffer those complications.

And encephalitis is one of those complications.

You don't inconvenience me even slightly. What a very odd thing to say. But I assumed it would be difficult to post supporting links and so on from your phone in hospital. And it's difficult to have a debate with someone who is constrained by circumstances to posting unsubstantiated statements and accusations of arrogance and dismissiveness.

seeker,
Don't forget the sarcasm? I thought it was quite a gentle dig about getting ones facts right.

Regarding the Huffpo and its coverage of the vaccination issue, well try searching on "Huffpo vaccination" for example:
scienceblogs.com/insolence/2009/05/01/what-to-do-about-huffpo/
www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2011/02/11/huffington-post-still-believes-vaccin
sethmnookin.com/2011/05/03/a-move-away-from-anti-vaccine-propaganda-at-the-huffington-post/
sethmnookin.com/2011/02/11/the-huffington-posts-medical-review-board-signs-off-on-vaccine-fear-mongering/

To say they have form for not being exactly unbiased might be to under-egg the pudding just a little.
Cheers.

CherriesAreRed I stumbled (accidentally) again across something that mentions vitamin A and nutrition, hence my point about juicing in my blog post. Look at the "cause" section of here:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measles

which says:
^Risk factors for severe measles and its complications include the following:

* Malnutrition
* Underlying immunodeficiency
* Pregnancy
* Vitamin A deficiency[7][8]^

I have read your most recent reply to me, and I am Irish, so will look into that epidemic you speak of.

Also, I don't really understand the long paragraph on peer reviewed journals that you felt the need to type up. I worked for a company for 6 years, where they were the basis of everything we did, so I didn't really need that mini lecture, and don't understand why you think that I did.

I note that there are people on here who don't believe in natural remedies and neither do they believe in homeopathy.

I have met many people like that in my life and they soon change their tune when they then turn out to rely on those exact things.

You'll probably not like the fact that I believe in Chinese Herbal Medicine too, but I have witnessed too many success stories from it to ever be dissuaded on that score.

As for the lady who gave the example of two measles girls side by side in hospital, one vaccinated one not, I for one WAS interested to hear that. I like true stories. It doesn't always have to be evidence for me, as often times the evidence is playing catch up with things we already know to be true. That's why for me, intuition is VERY important. But each to their own.

seeker,
Sorry, my links don't seem to have been enabled. Will try again:

scienceblogs.com/insolence/2009/05/01/what-to-do-about-huffpo/

www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2011/02/11/huffington-post-still-believes-vaccines-cause-autism/

sethmnookin.com/2011/05/03/a-move-away-from-anti-vaccine-propaganda-at-the-huffington-post/

sethmnookin.com/2011/02/11/the-huffington-posts-medical-review-board-signs-off-on-vaccine-fear-mongering/

Cheers

Bumble yummy

So doctors in the UK are misreporting a notifible disease purposively to conceal he fact that MMR is actually not working!

Surely the cause of the outbreak in South Wales, where the local paper ran an anti MMR campaign at the time of the Wakefield paper, and where there are still 6000 teenagers who are unvaccinated, is related to the fact that the MMR vaccination was inadequate to create herd immunity.

so we still have no alternative theory. just people who still think they know more than a childs own parents and doctors.

sorry if you dont like having such an attitude described as arrogance but it is quite exraordinary to claim one knows what is not wrong with a child whilst having nothing else to offer.

magdelen your quips about disney characters annonyed me. this may be a subject thst is fun to debate about on MN and make clever posts about people not getting their facts straight, but for lots of people this isnt a debate. it is real life. a little compassion and rrespect wouldnt go amiss rather than sarky comments about typos. excuse me am posting on a small phone and dont have my favourites bookmarked.

children like emily exist. she reacted to her vaccines. she ddeveloped fever and measles rash. she had encephalitis that vass vaccine induced. she has a diagnosis of ASD.

like i said, these children exist. the question is now how many. governments will do everything in their power to make sure that questioned remains unanswered. the costs involved in caring for such damaged children are enormous. and people will lose confidence in the vaccine program.

has anyone else noticed that in the media coverage, MMR is described by public health officials as 'the only way' to protect children against measles. to say such a thing is lie and spin. MMR is not the only way to protect against measles - it is the only way the government has decided to let parents have. they admit that if they made single measles vaccine available that many parents would choose it and that that would interfere with their MMR program.

the government is pushing a vaccine that many parents do not want, that has a bad safetu record and which is not medically justified for the population it is administered to. they are very dodgy ethical ground.

and yet people continue to cheer them on.

Beachcomber - in a sense the MMR is the 'only way' to offer vaccine protection because it's the only licenced vaccine available. What no-one has ever explained to me, is why they need MMR. What was wrong with the previous policy of vaccinating girls just before puberty, and doing the same with mumps for boys?

beach your post should read:

children like emily exist.

she had the vaccine.

she developed fever and measles rash.
she had encephalitis.
she has a diagnosis of ASD.

There is no way to PROVE that any of these events are related in her individual case.

On a population wide scale there is evidence that the vaccine is correlated (beyond the null hypothesis) with fever, rash and encephalitis.

Therefore it is reasonable to make a link between Emily having had the vaccine and then suffering those symptoms.

On a population wide scale there is evidence that the vaccine is uncorrelated (beyond the null hypothesis) with ASD.

Therefore it is unreasonable to make a link between Emily having had the vaccine and then suffering that symptom.

In conclusion it is possible and maybe even probable that Emily suffering fever, measles rash and encephalitis was linked to the vaccine but it is extremely unlikely that Emily suffering ASD is linked to the vaccine.

Beachcomber- I wasn't being snarky about typos. I was suggesting that if you can't post links supporting your assertions it's quite difficult to debate with you-for example, you say there are thousands of MMR damaged children out there- I'd quite like to know where that figure comes from.

I have never said, and neither has anyone else, that MMR- or any other medical treatment- is 100% safe. Or that encephalitis is not a recognised complication, of both the vaccine and of measles.

But you are wrong to say that the MMR has a bad safety record- it doesn't.

And it is not on, it really isn't, to call anyone who doesn't automatically accept a parent's point of view is being arrogant and disrespectful. It completely closes down any possible debate.

In conclusion it is possible and maybe even probable that Emily suffering fever, measles rash and encephalitis was linked to the vaccine but it is extremely unlikely that Emily suffering ASD is linked to the vaccine.

But if she had suffered all these symptoms after a bout of measles, most people would say that the measles caused it. There would be no way of proving that this was the case.

Cherries, I already said that they aren't necessarily doing it intentionally to distort figures but that could be the result if they don't consider a measles diagnosis because the child has been vaccinated. Why would they ask what the child's vaccine status is if it is not relevant to the diagnosis?

Excep that some of those things are recognised complications of both the vqccine and measles- but ASD isn't.

They ask about the vaccine status because if a child is vaccinated it is less likely to be measles, and might well be something else.

It's also a way of collecting statistics on the effectiveness of vaccines- if lots of children develop measles who are vaccinated, then there's something going wrong somewhere.

lavolcan you are correct there would be no PROOF. Again it would be reasonable to conclude that measles caused those symptoms...particularly if you could isolate the virus / find antibodies.

At a population level infection with the virus is seen to be hugely correlated (beyond chance) with those symptoms. But you can never be sure in an individual case.

I had a case of high fever, swollen glands etc and also chest pain and difficulty breathing.

If anyone had tested they would have proven that I had a flu virus overload and an immune response to it.

It would have been reasonable to conclude that the chest pain and difficulty breathing was due to a secondary infection following on (as in the general population this is a highly correlated event) but in my specific case it was nothing of the sort.

Lots of things can cause chest pains and difficulty breathing, and the fact you have just had epic flu should't blind you to those possibilities. It didn't blind my doctor and hence I got the correct diagnosis and cure.

hmmm actually does anyone anywhere claim that measles causes autism?

For the 100th time nobody is saying vaccine damage doesn't exist, i have never said it. FWIW I worked for a carers charity for many years and one of the volunteers adopted daughter was badly effected by the single measles vaccine and had the mind of a 6 year old but wasn't autistic. Although the story i was told was she had it when she was 6 weeks , but she would have been far older than 6 weeks when measles was introduced, and i also thought measles was given at a later age . She would be around 50 now now, but was 36 when i knew her. It does show how stories get garbled.

The MMR does not have a bad safety record at all, and is one of the most investigated vaccines, again look at the IOM i linked to above and Magdelens links.

La Volcan - please look at the links I gave to SENSE (re rubella) and Encephylitis.org.

Mumps complications are far more than sterility in boys. Girls ovaries are affected the same way. There is a 4% chance of pancreatitis which may lead to diabetes type 1. Mumps was the leading cause of deafness prior to vaccination.

am actually laughing at the idea that MMR vaccines do not have a bad safety record when two versions of this triple vaccone have already been withdrawn. the government only has the MMRII left now.

the MMRV is no longer recommended by the CDC in america due to its poor safety record. three out of four measles containing non single measles vaccines are no longer used (at least not on western kids).

how bad do things have to be before people will admit that combined measles containing vaccines have so far proven themselves to be a bad idea.

how many children are involved in the US litigation again? i believe it is around 5000.

and there were well over a thousand in the UK. although they of course had their legal aid pulled in rather disturbing circumstances.

Stats please, beachcomber.

YABU - AW presented his research, it was peer reviewed and the Lancelet published it...it was the media storm that caused the problem and the way the government handled it (very badly!)
Don't give me a leaflet telling me a vaccine is 100% safe - that insults my intelligence- no vaccine is - it is a balance of risks and the reason you can't leave immediately after a vaccine but stay in waiting room for 10(?) mins or so - in case there is a bad reaction...
Not enough was known about the risks - they should have offered the single vaccines until further research could be done...they are still publishing papers/debating now about it ...
If you read scientific papers about almost anything there will be conflicting results ...(I have to be very careful here - but I worked on the early stages of a potential drug for treatment of an affliction that is rising in the population - as an undergraduate in my honours project... the chemical it was based had been produced with a variety of modifications - looking at the publications there were conflicting results even between the same variations in the basic chemical structure- I think it is now being used and no doubt it works and is safe. However I will say that my results did not support the method of action proposed by the pharmaceutical company and some of their research to elucidate the mechanism was performed by someone I knew and would not particularly trust their research...)
If there is a genetic link to autism it may mean that children are more susceptible to the vaccine, etc etc .
DD1 (at height of storm) - I balanced all the information, I waited until she was older - 2.5yo ish and I had her assessed for autism before having the MMR -I thought it was safe but at least IF she then developed Autism there would be some evidence that that might be a causal factor and it wouldn't be in vain. At the time there was concerns about contamination of and therefore the safety of the single measles vaccine.
I gave DD2 the MMR but again when older - they had their boosters at around 5...mainly cos I wanted their immune systems to be better developed ...
As for taking blood etc from children - people who work in labs regularly provide samples (mainly as controls -ie normal) I went to visit a lab that was researching a blood disorder I may or may not have - they took my blood to use in experiments...