Aibu to ask for opinions about the MMR jab

[shatteredmama]

I'm by no means an anti vaxxer, dc has had all of the standard jabs so far, just turned 12 months old so it's time for the MMR, have an appointment booked for it next week, just can't stop feeling twitchy about it.

Would really love to hear opinions on it, or of any up to date reports on its effects, I've scoured the web but can't find anything other than the standard NHS type advice.

It's got to make you wonder at a man who conducted false research and made it fit a theory that played on parents worries, especially those who had children with autism. He was, and still is, willing to risk children's health and even their lives for his own self serving needs.

I wish he was locked up.

Mt

I paid for my first two children tof have the single jabs for measles mumps and rubella. When my third child came along, monet was tight and I couldn't afford the singles. I didn't want to give him the mmr so held out until I was in a better financial position for the singles. My son was diagnosed with autism. Now had I have given him the MMR, there's no doubt in my mind that I'd blame his autism on that....makes you think!

My DD had the MMR. She has autism.

I had single vaccines. I have autism.

My mum had no vaccines. She has autism.

My granny had no vaccines. I'd bet my precisely organised jaffa cake collection that she had autism too.

Genes cause autism.

Oops, don't know where my first illiterate post came from.

As another anecdotal story, I had a car crash on the way to ds' first MMR jab. When I got out of hospital, I really started noticing DS had lots of unusual behaviours. I rearranged the MMR appointment for a month later. I worried that he'd been hurt in the crash and that was causing the problems. If he'd had the MMR at that first appointment, I'd probably have worried it had caused them instead.

My DS had the MMR vaccine and was fine. I have to admit I dithered and he had it about 4 months late. In that time he had chicken pox and was really poorly. It made me realise I couldn't live with myself if he then got measles etc when I could have prevented it.

I had measles when I was 8 (pre MMR vaccine) and I remembered being off school for 2 weeks and feeling horrible. It went round my whole class at school.

Yabu

Get your child vaccinated unless your own GP advises against it due to real medical issues that make it dangerous. Simple.

Sorry, meant to say DS has autism!

My son has autism. The signs of it were more obvious at around the time he had the vaccine but there were signs from birth. MMR didn't cause his autism.

Your asking strangers on the Internet. Jesus Christ if you are that worried make an appointment and speak to a medical professional, read medical journals etc.

To be fair, hedgehog, Wakefield's claim wasn't that MMR caused people to learn all the rules to Dungeons and Dragons while pondering whether to file Stevie Nicks' solo albums under "N" for Nicks for "F" for Fleetwood Mac, nor that it would increase your chances of getting a job at GCHQ.

Wakefield's claim, or at the very least the way his claim was portrayed, was that MMR caused regressive, non-communicative autism, and therefore played on parents' deepest fears.

If he'd just suggested that MMR might cause your child to have Asperger's I suspect the impact would have been lower, in large part because in 1996 the phrase "ASD" or even "Asperger's" would have been unknown to many, if not most, parents. In 1998 when the brouhaha started, "autism" had a general image of non-communicative children rocking in the corner of the room, which was why the scare was so powerful.

Does anyone know when "autistic spectrum" became a concept in widespread use? A review from 2000 uses the phrase, as do a few of the more recent papers it cites from the late 1990s, but a cursory search doesn't find much. Wakefield's bullshit original paper doesn't talk about ASD, it talks about autism by that name, and it's obvious from what is written about it that it isn't Asperger's that's being described.

Non communicative (as opposed to non verbal) rocking in a corner autism is not how most people with autism are. Ds has severe autism but that doesn't describe him.

Does anyone know when "autistic spectrum" became a concept in widespread use?

It was following a research paper by Lorna Wing which unearthed the previous research by Hans Asperger. Can't remember the date though.

Lorna Wing research which identifies autism as a spectrum disorder was 1981 and officially added to the WHO's diagnostic manual in 1992.

Non communicative (as opposed to non verbal) rocking in a corner autism is not how most people with autism are. Ds has severe autism but that doesn't describe him.

I'm perfectly aware of that.

The point was that when the scandal broke in 1998, most parents weren't.

That's why it was such a powerful scare: it went to parents' deepest fears.

I had babies in 1999 and 2001, they both had the MMR. There was plenty of doubt about the validity of the research already, but the hype from the media was crazy. Every parent I knew went through agonies about whether to vaccinate or not.

What persuaded me was knowing an adult who had had encephalitis secondary to measles when they were a baby, and the many ways (physical and learning difficulties) that their life was changed was a far more scary risk than than the risk from the MMR.

Thanks, hedgehog. It's interesting: there's talk of the autistic spectrum, but in quotes which imply it's a new thing, in (Wing, 1993), but no mention of a spectrum in (Wing and Gould, 1979). The concept is presumably in (Wing 1988). (Einsenmajer et al, 1996) refer in passing to "autistic spectrum" in their last paragraph, which in turn cites (Wing, 1991) which I think is the chapter you're referring to as picking up Asperger's works. Wing writes about it in a book again in (Wing, 1996).

So my gut feel is that the concept of a spectrum emerged 1988-1991, but wasn't named until the mid-1990s. Wakefield publishes in 1998. So I stand by my contention that in 1998 the typical parent on the Clapham omnibus hadn't heard of the autistic spectrum, hadn't heard of Asperger's as a form of autism (or, probably, at all), but had heard of regressive, non-commnicative autism. Hence the scare: for people who didn't read the literature and didn't have access to a medical library (and I've just pulled up half a dozen medical papers from my office desk: imagine doing that in 1996 with a university ID card and a morning in a medschool) autism just mean Very Scary Bad Thing You Do Not Want.

Eisenmajer, R., Prior, M., Leekam, S., Wing, L., Gould, J., Welham, M. and Ong, B., 1996. Comparison of clinical symptoms in autism and Asperger's disorder. Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 35(11), pp.1523-1531.

Wing, L., 1991. The relationship between Asperger’s syndrome and Kanner’s autism. Autism and Asperger syndrome, pp.93-121.

Wing, L., 1993. The definition and prevalence of autism: a review. European child & adolescent psychiatry, 2(1), pp.61-74.

Wing, L., 1988. The continuum of autistic characteristics (pp. 91-110). Springer US.

Wing, L. and Gould, J., 1979. Severe impairments of social interaction and associated abnormalities in children: Epidemiology and classification. Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 9(1), pp.11-29.

Wing, L., 1996. The autistic spectrum: A guide for parents and professionals. Constable.

Wing, L., 1997. The autistic spectrum. The lancet, 350(9093), pp.1761-1766.

To be honest I think it's only really filtered down to average joe in the past 10 years and even now it's not really understood. People I've spoken too are generally really kind and supportive but still don't have a clue what it actually means, especially with high functioning people with well developed masking skills.

Watch this video and the second one. It explains it very well.
www.khanacademy.org/science/health-and-medicine/infectious-diseases/influenza/v/vaccines-and-the-autism-myth-part-1

Why on earth people believed a study done on 12 hand picked children already with autism I do not know. 12!!!!!!
And there have been dozens of studies since which included hundreds/thousands/millions of children which conclusively showed that there is no proof.

If you feel uncomfortable about it, you can have the measles and rubella vaccines separately. The single mumps vaccine isn't currently available.

My son is not aloud live vaccines because of neutropenia and An immune deficiency. The only one his immunologist is really worried about him not having is the Mmr he's been trying to find a way of him having it for months I was told for an immuno compromised child measles could be fatal. So with that in mind I think herd immunity is important it certainly is for my son.

bloody hell Facebook for research