Help me make sense of MMR - hype or theory

[felicity10]

OK, so I've been through a few pages of previous posts, I must be missing something because I can't make sense of it!

DD is 1 and I've had a letter about the vacs from the GP. I've heard about the MMR in the news few years ago and about the link to autism, but I just would really value your views.

Single vacs with no mumps or the MMR? Can anyone point me in the direction of key MMR issues?

I just don't want to get to the gp's and then feel like I am getting bullied into having the mmr - it is normally very no nonsense nurses who barely speak english, so will be unlikely to give me a clear answer as to any risks.

I am amazed that we have this lack of clarity in the UK.

Many thanks in advance!

Which is of course yet another massive undeclared conflict of interest.

You couldn't make it up.

Incredibly detailed arguments on both sides here - to the point of being intimidating. It's never easy to doubt such a sacred cow as vaccination.

May I add a little colour to the facts and figures in the form of personal experience?

My four unvaccinated children all had measles the summer before last. It was pretty intense and to witness the immune system in action was frankly awe inspiring. It was the biggest immune chuck out they've ever experienced and it felt very cleansing. Almost like a massive de-clutter.

They more than bounced back to health as I knew they would. They shone with well being. Now they get ill far less frequently and far less seriously than most of their friends and always recover quickly.

As far as I'm concerned, my game plan is working.

BTW my suspicion of vaccination pre-dates Wakefield and has nothing to do with autism. My experience of medics leads me to question everything. medical profession is too self satisfied. I don't find they take mother nature into account sufficiently which is short sighted of them.

I had measles as a child and remember my brother and sister and all my friends having it. It wasn't considered something to fear.

I hear they're going to bring in a chicken pox vaccine soon. Tsk!

Leoni, it's not that people don't know this stuff and are naive.
Many have read the same stuff, had the same thoughts, researched into it and come out the other side.

See, I don't know how people can "read the same stuff", research into it, and have the same thoughts, and come out thinking differently.

The most well-researched people are always the non-vaccinators. That's why sausage, and stata, and bruffin and the rest, all disappear in the end. That's why, paisleyleaf, you've got nothing to say except basically "I beg to differ". If you and others could make a case against what's being said, I have no doubt that you would. Certainly you have the depth of feeling about it. But you are unable to either because you haevn't researched it as well, or quite simply because it's impossible to argue with.

The barefaced shamelessness of the GMC hearing only worked because people think: oh it must be alright, they couldn't possibly be acting with anything but the best motives. Likewise the repeated lies and disingenuousness over this explosion in autistic disorder.

I am amazed every time I hear "It's a labelling difference." "We didn't used to diagnose it but it was always like this". And the wearisome "Autism has always been spotted around eighteen months". Even people as old as me (early forties) who can actually remember that no, it isn't and it wasn't.

It is Orwellian: it's as if history is being rewritten.

Spidermama, excellent. I wish mine had had the measles. When people say that I'm hiding behind herd immunity I think no, I'm pissed off because you're stopping my child bathing in a healthy pool of mild childhood disease.

Small things intrigued me. For example: around the time that the MMR issue was getting the greatest publicity, it "emerged" that the last great vaccine scandal the whooping cough issue of the seventies had been only a "scare". Of course, many appearances by commentators explaining how a completely unnecessary ahem drop in vaccine uptake had endangered children's lives.

I've absolutely no evidence for this but it seemed an extraordinary coincidence that after more than twenty years this should be discovered. I just didn't think it was serendipitous, more like "deep background" ..inserting into the public consciousness this subliminal message, it's just another scare, nothing to worry about.

Same with the pathologists. These women are not even talking about vaccine induced injury, they haven't said the word vaccine at all. But they are questioning whether symptoms such as retinal damage in babies "automatically" indicate Shaken Baby Syndrome, or abuse. It's the first step, the very first step, to saying if not SBS then what? They aren't being allowed to take that step.

I too don't know how people can read the same information and think anything other than;

There are studies which show an MMR/autism link to be biologically plausible. (Such as children having persistent vaccine strain measles replication in diseased areas of their guts - and the disease is consistent with that of a viral origin.)

There are thousands of parents who tell remarkably similar stories of what happened to their child after vaccination with MMR. (And the children often have similar medical histories/mitochondrial dysfunction/family history of autoimmune disease.)

We have no solid science which shows a link to be unlikely.

We have no other explanation for what happened to these children. (And those who claim they do not have autistic enterocolitis have never examined the children in question.)

The children improve in both health and behaviour when they are treated for the condition described by Dr Wakefield.

There appear to be some murky politics going on but no concrete examination of the science.

I cannot see, given the above, how anybody can think anything other than a MMR/autism link is likely.

And nobody ever really argues otherwise other than saying 'you are mad/paranoid/hysterical/deluded/and that Wakefield was a fraud but I don't really know what he has supposed to have done.'

Why? Why do people not want to see what is plainly in front of their noses?

"I cannot see, given the above, how anybody can think anything other than a MMR/autism link is likely."

Am absolutely with both of you. To put it at its most basic -- it's like, DUH.

Yes completely agree about herd immunity, absolutely. Have argued many times on these boards that while natural herd immunity is a real and valuable thing, vaccination "herd" immunity is nothing of the sort. In the natural environment immunity is not contagious but it spreads. It passes from mother to baby, there is multiple exposure and antibody creation without illness and so on.

What people call vaccination herd immunity is simply, less exposure to the disease. It's not herd immunity at all.

It's ludicrous, really. If I've had measles, I'm immune. Put me in a room with someone who's got measles and I won't catch it. Put me in a room with a hundred people who've got measles and I won't catch it.

This herd immunity "you get yours or mine won't work" theory is nuts. It suggests that if a vaccinated person is put in a room with one contagious person, they'll probably be alright, but with a hundred contagious people, their vaccination immunity collapses and they'll catch measles.

What's that about? That's not immunity. And these are the grounds on which people are encouraged to have vaccinations?

Do people even think beyond the catchphrase?
That's not immunity.

I'm always doing that. Leaving a little bit on the end.

Lenoie I'd like that link because I like herd immunity and the maths that destroys the myth.

Yes, people seem to forget that the phrase 'herd immunity' was coined to describe what happens in populations when a certain number of people catch the wild disease and become immune to it.

Herd immunity (the real kind, that is) also depends on the older members of the population getting their immunity naturally boosted by coming into contact with ill children.

Chicken pox is often used as an example here - you catch CP as a child and become immune to it (generally), your immunity wanes over time. You look after your sick children/come into contact with your neighbour's sick children and you get a natural booster. This natural booster helps prevent adults developing shingles.

www.news-medical.net/news/2005/09/01/12896.aspx

Then of course as gooseberry says, herd immunity also involves maternal antibodies and breastfeeding.

This is something that has always concerned me about measles - we know that measles is much more dangerous in populations in which it is a new disease. I worry about the effect mass vaccination will have on future populations' resistance to the disease.

www.badscience.net/2008/08/the-medias-mmr-hoax/

Read about the media hype - what was ignored and what wasn't. Read about people who suddenly become experts in the scientific world.

Some children will always get ill with vaccines. Generally they are safe. isn't that the point.

Conspiracy theorists....well they love a good conspiracy.

Fifitot, do you intend this to sound as callous as it comes across or have you just not read the thread?

"Some children will always get ill with vaccines."

We touched on the ethics of the 'a bit of collatoral damage is okaydokey as long as I'm alright jackism' school of moral code, upthread.

But yes, Beach, I forgot about the older/younger. With a vaccinated population you don't have those children who are just immune: the sister who doesn't get measles when the others do. Because of previous exposure boosting maternal antibodies, possibly? Because of stronger, untampered with, immune system?

Re: unexposed populations. There was a terrible story in Malaysia about an outbreak of measles in a previously unexposed population, during an immunisation campaign. Questions were asked: local officials said a. see how the immunisation campaign was necessary and b. all the dead (about thirteen) were

sorry

"buried with their medical records according to tradition" so there could be no investigation.

as if

Leonie that's a great, great link, I heart that guy. I heart that neurosurgeon, perhaps I should say, for the naysayers who'll refuse to open it and read what it says. A fantastic destruction of the herd immunity myth.

"As for the media, they are absolutely clueless. I have found that "reporters" (we have few real journalists these days) rarely understand what they are reporting on and always trust and rely upon people in positions of official power, even if those people are unqualified to speak on the subject."

Ain't that the truth.

ps I know we are being serious but am I allowed to at www.imaquack.com

MNHQ please don't delete Beach's post.

oh god, are we re-visiting "oh, but there will always be some children who react to vaccines" again?

because of course, that means it is ok

no need to try to work out why, or how it might be preventable - it's always going to happen

I know. It's like saying

"Bollocks to you lot and your children. Just shut up about them."