to think that there is a witch hunt against Andrew Wakefield?

[MagalyZz]

I just can't believe that they're still gunning for this guy!?

Whatever you make of his research, it WAS his research and he found what he found and he should be allowed to "suggest a link"

I have a child on the spectrum who had the MMR and I do not think the MMR had anything to do with it, but I do believe Dr Wakefield that a tiny percentage of people do react very badly to this vaccine.

Leave the guy alone ffs!!

Sorry very random link popped up of its own accord there in the last one - will try again.

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12145534

you see, therein lies the rpoblem.

you are not merelt spreading your opinion - you are quoting what others say are "facts".

Goldacre claims somehting that Wakefield never said.

Deer does the same all the time.

Goldacre and Deer are always quoted, but no-one quotes Wakefield.

Why is that?

Is it because he never actually said what people claim he said?

It really is not good enough, when a persons career and reputation is on the line, to simply lazily quote texts which suit your view.

I do not know why Goldacre and Der (to name just a couple) persist in trotting out all the misinformation, but it is not exactly helpful (nor actually good form in a discussion) to rely on easily disproved "facts", and then just say "oh no, you can'tsay I am wrong, I am just statign my opinion"

Because you are not - you are repeating information which has no basis in truth as "fact", and when challenged on why, instead of answering just leave.

My 3 year old could do better at discussing anissue, tbh.

The ethical approval thing is slightly complex. It has been reported as though Wakefield did research on children without ethical approval at all. (Which again is the stuff of bad and not very believable films).

The Royal Free team were running two studies under two different sets of ethical approval.

The GMC is trying to claim that the ethical approval applied for (and granted) did not apply to the Lancet children and that ethical approval for a different later study was the one that applied to the Lancet study (most of which was clinical anyway). By claiming this they are able to rule that research was done before the ethical approval was finalised and that some of the approval did not cover the diagnosis of the children.

Anyone who tries to make out that the Royal Free team did not work under ethical approval is misinformed and being a bit thick really. (And possibly hasn't read the Lancet paper which declares its ethical approval).

I think this article lays it out fairly clearly although a bit of background knowledge helps. This is definitely more complex than Deer and Goldacre are clearly able to grasp and report on.

www.cryshame.co.uk//index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=125&Itemid=135

Yes it is true that the 1998 Wakefield study did not specifically look for the presence of measles in gut tissue of the study children. The only association alluded to in that paper was the proximity of apparent behavioural changes with the children having received the MMR (I think a median of 12 days).

However it seems that many others are also getting their references confused. In response to The Jolly Pirate's allusion to a study of measles in gut tissue carried out by Arfez (sic), Beachcomber somewhat disingenuously linked to the Afzal paper (1) looking for measles virus in blood cells, whereas she should be well aware that Afzal's group have performed at least three studies on gut tissue; two in 1998 and one in 2000. These can easily be found on PubMed. His group's work in 2006 on peripheral blood cells was published partly in response to the Kawashima (2) findings in 2000, which claimed to have found measles virus in peripheral blood cells in autistic children (more specifically: one of eight patients with Crohn disease (aged 18?34 years), one of three patients with ulcerative colitis (aged 15?31 years), and three of nine children with autism (aged 3-10). Interestingly, Beachcomber quotes the Kawashima paper as one of Wakefield's further studies a couple of posts further on, so any criticism of the Afzal paper such as: "... if they had examined children with the correct profile it was extremely unlikely that they were going to find measles RNA in the blood of these children years after their exposure" should also apply to the Kawashima study seeing as 40% of their positives in blood were in UC and Chrohn's patients. Unfortunately, the autistic enterocolitis diagnosis is still one of Wakefield's own hypotheses (and therefore not accepted as a clinical diagnosis as such), so what can other laboratories do if Wakefield won't share his 'ethically-sourced' research specimens? Perhaps he learned his lesson from the Chadwick study (3), in which his own Inflammatory Bowel Disease Group labs found no evidence of measles RNA in IBD cases using very sensitive amplification techniques (4), and thus did not support Wakefield's earlier hypothesis about measles and IBD from 1992.

The Uhlmann paper (5) from O'Leary's lab purporting to show over 80% of samples positive for measles virus has received a number of strong criticisms, particularly because instead of using established measles primer sequences for PCR, they designed new primers for their investigation (this is also true of the Kawashima study). From the data presented in the paper, they failed to do essential preliminary work to show that their new primers were genuinely detecting measles sequences rather than amplifying non-specific regions. Not a single one of the Uhlmann measles positives was sequenced to show it was measles-specific, and later work by d'Souza (6) showed that both Uhlmann and Kawashima primers amplified non-specifically in terms of amplicon length. When blood cells from ASD cases and controls were examined using the primers, 100% of cases and 100% of controls were positive for measles with Uhlmann primers and 0% cases and 0% controls with the Kawashima primers. When sequenced, all the positive Uhlmann amplicons consisted of non-measles sequences. These results collectively make the Uhlmann/O'Leary and Kawashima findings non-repeatable under better controlled conditions, so unless someone comes up with a more impressive study, the null hypothesis has to prevail; which is that there is no association with measles and autistic enterocolitis from the published laboratory studies.

(1) Afzal MA, Ozoemena LC, O?Hare A, et al. Absence of detectable measles virus genome sequence in blood of autistic children who have had their MMR vaccination during the routine childhood immunization schedule of UK. J Med Virol. 2006;78: 623?630
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16555271

(2) Detection and sequencing of measles virus from peripheral mononuclear cells from patients with inflammatory bowel disease and autism.
Kawashima H, Mori T, Kashiwagi Y, Takekuma K, Hoshika A, Wakefield A.
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10759242

(3) Chadwick N, Bruce IJ, Schepelmann S, Pounder RE, Wakefield AJ(1998). Measles virus RNA is not detected in inflammatory bowel disease using hybrid capture and reverse transcription followed by the polymerase chain reaction. J Med Virol. 1998 Aug;55(4):305-11.
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9661840

(4) Chadwick N, Bruce I, Davies M, van Gemen B, Schukkink R, Khan K, Pounder R, Wakefield A.
A sensitive and robust method for measles RNA detection.
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9506813

(5) Potential viral pathogenic mechanism for new variant inflammatory bowel disease. Uhlmann V, Martin CM, Sheils O, Pilkington L, Silva I, Killalea A, Murch SB, Walker-Smith J, Thomson M, Wakefield AJ, O'Leary JJ.
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11950955 (full paper free to read)

(6) No evidence of persisting measles virus in peripheral blood mononuclear cells from children with autism spectrum disorder. D'Souza Y, Fombonne E, Ward BJ.
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17015560 (full paper free to read)

I seem to recall a number of hospitals getting told off for taking organs out of deceased children without permission for years, that was against all the rules......when they got busted there were lots of apologies, but no disciplinary action.

My gut (if you'll pardon the pun) is that the medical establishment is ganging up against him.

(Indaba lights touch paper then stands well, well back........)

Musukebba what do you make of Dr Singh's work? (which nobody ever seems to bring up or comment on).

What do you make of the recent 'discoveries' with regards to urinary peptides, the findings that some autistic children have an impaired ability to digest certain proteins and that they are helped by digestive enzyme (FDA endorsed) drugs which help to remedy this?

I'm curious because these are all things that Wakefield, Thoughtful House and many many parents have been saying for years (whilst being ridiculed and vilified).

With regards to Afzal - looking for measles RNA in children who do not meet the criteria of the subgroup identified by Wakefield et al is pretty useless in terms of challenging Wakefield's hypothesis.

O'Leary's reliability was confirmed by the Hornig study.

Whilst we arse about with politics and irrelevant studies we are doing nothing to help the children identified by Wakefield. Oh hang on we are because the FDA is in the process of fast tracking a drug to treat a condition Wakefield told us about 12 years ago. I guess we have to be thankful for small mercies in this ghastly mess.

(The Hornig study which did find measles virus in the gut of a child with autism and gut problems - I guess one slipped through the net, although this child is rarely mentioned. It would seem that like all the others he just doesn't really matter very much)

Beach:

Re Dr Singh's work: there is a section in the d'Souza publication showing that they attempted to repeat Singh's findings, without success (free for all to read at the journal reference I gave above). An extract of the relevant results is:
"Anti-Measles Antibody Titers.
The mean titer (+/- SD) for the ASD group was 4.3 (+/-3.9) IU/mL vs 4.6 (+/- 4.0) IU/mL for the control group (2-tailed t test, P=0.722, not significant). Three outlier samples were removed from this analysis (1 sample from the ASD group at 120.3 IU and 2 samples from the control group at 266.6 and 86.7 IU). Although unvaccinated children (n=2) and children of unknown status (n=4) were included in the antibody analysis, their inclusion did not skew the mean titers (data not shown). Anti-measles antibodies were detectable in all of the subjects, regardless of vaccination history."

Re the findings of several groups on gut disturbances associated with ASD: personally I find it more convincing - whether or not urinary peptide markers are used - and anything that can alleviate such suffering in a properly-conducted trial is good news. I think I've said before that Wakefield could well have been on to something important with his earlier findings, but chose a very ill-advised path to find the cause.

Re O'Leary lab reliability: Hornig's study is entitled: "Lack of Association between Measles Virus Vaccine and Autism with Enteropathy: A Case-Control Study" and can be read in full here. O'Leary's lab was included in the three blinded sites used for analysis of the same samples. One lab (not identified), got positive results which were not repeatable by the other two labs, and on retesting all three got negative results. We do not know whether O'Leary's lab was the one that got the false positives, or that it wasn't, so we cant say from that report. However, seeing as the consensus was that all the results were negative, it's more evidence against an association of enteropathy with measles vaccination.

O'Leary's lab was subject to extremely detailed investigation by Steve Bustin as an expert witness in the Cedillo trial, who uncovered a long list of shortcomings with regard to the provenance of the data published in the Uhlmann paper. Widespread DNA contamination of both samples and controls, poorly-performing machinery, subjective treatment of the raw data for the controls, and evidence of changes made to notebooks were found. These sorts of things seriously undermine the reliability of the laboratory evidence presented from that lab.

Thanks for your response. I'm working just now but there are a couple of things I would like to comment on when I have time later on.

"Don't forget that he wasn't struck off because of the correctness or not of his research but rather for his unethical research methodology that subjected children to unecessary medical procedures."

The selection of procedures performed on the children were taken not by Wakefield but by John Walker-Smith, one of the foremost experts in pediatric gastroenterology in the world.

Dragging up an old thread, for what purpose?