Reactions to MMR - how long do they last?

[MrsMoppetMama]

My DD (13 months) had her MMR 11 days ago, she had a bad reaction after about 3 days (high temp and trouble breathing) and we took her to urgent care center. Although this has now passed, she seems to be really out of sorts and has stopped sleeping through. Her normal routine was brilliant as she went down from about 7 - 7. Now she is waking every two hours and is very unhappy. Is this normal? is this because of her MMR or is it just a phase? She has also stopped taking her bottle before bed, is it likely that she has weaned herself? Help! It's been pretty easy going with her up to now so a bit stressed by all this.

I found this to be a very interesting article, and this one too

Apologies for the long replies - not normally something I go in for. I wanted to appropriately reply to saintly's equally long posts. So yes, having a short hand for common concepts is great.

And of course, I didn't mean them all at once! She asked for alternative suggestions to anti-vaccinators, and I gave her a list to choose from.

*alternative to 'anti-vax' or 'anti-vaxers'

Very interesting, I didn't realise the circulating VDPV's were so prevalent.

It depends what you mean by skeptical. I'm no more skeptical of vaccinations than I am of antibiotics. I am skeptical of the way both are used. Antibiotics not so much these days, I was delighted that post seizure from an infection the hospital spent a long time explaining to me why they wouldn't be giving ds3 antibs (they didn't notice me saying that was great).

My skepticism of the politics of vaccination began before I knew ds1 was autistic. The MMR stuff kicked off and my friend rang me and asked what I thought. I said I thought MMR was safe, autism shows at 18 months blah blah blah. I don't know why she asked me - she was quite capable of reading the stuff herself. Anyway ds1 was due his so I started to read and found what I believed to be misinformation from the dept of health. They were reporting Wakefield as saying one thing when he wasn't. I expected to read a few papers that would confirm to me that MMR was safe. Instead I've never stopped reading - in large part because ds1 was dxed autistic of course.

I wrote to the dept of health querying a few things and wasn't very impressed with the reply. This began my interest. As an example I am not skeptical at all of the mumps vaccine. It protects against mumps - not as well as originally expected but whatever. However, I remain totally unconvinced of the need to mass immunise against mumps and am concerned that it could result in problems such as making mumps an adult rather than childhood disease. It may not.

My skepticism is very much not related to autism as it's an unusual case. I'm a bit about the reluctance to report potential adverse reactions and I feel sorry for my friends in this position. Put it this way, I was skeptical about the politics of vaccination before I even met them.

La Volcan I didn't mean them all at once either!

Hey, you write long posts if you want. I'm not telling you what you can or can't do.

So skeptic you are then. Are you sure this doesn't taint what you read and how you interpret it?

Shurely 'influence' would be a more neutral word?

I'd be just as happy with influence.

Which specific paper and in what way? I don't see how believing urabe strain mumps should never have been used in the UK, for example would affect how I interpret the science. I do sometimes become interested in who has funded work. I'm not sure that's a bad thing.

It does mean, I admit, that I don't believe secondary sources and try to find primary. To use a recent example: nasal flu vaccine. The BBC said (I wanted to quote but the news website won't open for me ATM) something like the group receiving the biggest benefit from vaccinating children will be the middle aged. But that wasn't a direct quote from anyone. The quotes given certainly fitted with that scenario but equally would have fitted if she'd actually said that another advantage of the campaign would be to protect the middle aged, which is a different thing entirely. The way I feel about a mass flu vaccination of children changes completely depending on whether or not the child receiving the vaccination is going to be the one receiving most benefit. I'm still none the wiser btw - certainly don't trust anything the BBC says about vaccination. They interviewed me recently (not about vaccination) I wasn't misquoted but the context of the article made it sound like I was arguing something I wasn't (I hadn't even been asked about the position I was supposedly defending, and had I been would have argued against it.)

I was refering in general to papers you choose to read and how you interpret them saintly.

To use your example, you quite rightly point to the big difference between 'biggest benefit for the middle-aged' and 'another benefit is to protect the middle-aged'. I've seen many examples on threads where sources has been misquoted or quoted out of context (almost certainly not done on purpose, but because there is a little of "you see what you want to see").

The link up-thread wrt India and polio (sorry to keep harking back, it just conveniently illustrates my point) was only one paper of two that were published - it was only one take of the polio controversy. I only found the second by accident, but this illustrates the problem of reading papers in isolation.

Well, that's why it's a good thing that there is more than one person on this thread, other people can find the other papers that put a different point of view - and we have, wait for it - a discussion!

My interpretation comes from the context of all my reading and experiences. I might link to a paper to demonstrate something. It doesn't mean I haven't thought about what else is being said. Take the second paper discussed here - described as 'an excellent paper'. Really? For starters it only looks at 71 cases of autism and no-one has ever suggested those would have all been triggered by MMR, quite the opposite. Also looking at GP visits is not a great way to pick up parental concerns about autism imo. In part perhaps because GP's are well known to not be very clued up on autism and so people are often advised to go elsewhere for referrals (I laughed at my friend being told girls couldn't get autism by her GP, until a GP said to me after I'd explained about having ds1 'autism? terrible condition, girls don't get it you know'). I actually asked around after I first came across this paper and asked which medical professional parents first approached when they became concerned about their child's development in case my experience was unusual. A few, but not many, said GP. It seems that trotting off to the health visitor is quite a common route. I certainly didn't go to my GP when I was concerned about regression, I don't think I have ever consulted my GP about anything to do with ds1's autism. So yes, my experiences and beliefs certainly influence my interpretation of papers.

Of course the study tells us something, it's not completely useless but I think to describe it as an excellent paper is over stating it just a little a bit. IIRC Taylor et al in contrast did find an increase in parental concern in the 6 months after the MMR (can't remember how they measured it though, and it has been ages since I read the paper), although iirc they dismissed it as not relevant. But rather than latch onto that and use it to prove a point I would say tbh that increase isn't that interesting unless it can be shown to the relate to the potential MMR group anyway. I had an increase in concern after ds1's measles jab (he stopped talking a month after it - I was pretty bloody concerned about that) but I don't think his speech regression was related to the measles jab, so it's irrelevant, so the timing in my case would be coincidental. Multiply that by everyone else's experiences. These are not good ways to search for a small effect imo.

Can you really say your beliefs about vaccination do not influence how you interpret Pagwatch's story at all?

Anyway, we're never going to agree, and I really have to spend the next respite day with my younger children and catching up on work. If anyone happens to stumble across anything new on infection and compulsive behaviours I would be very grateful if I could be pointed in the general direction.

Just out of interest, from one of the links posted by Piglet, why do children need four doses of OPV before age 12 months?
I can't remember how many I had or how old I was. I remember having one and I was old enough to walk.
Why do they now need four so early?

BFG Your link re: India/polio was actually a critique of a different paper in the same edition of the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics, 2005, Oct-Dec, not a critique of the link I posted which was from a much later issue (2012 Apr-Jun). I don't want to keep harping on about it, but you did keep going on about me being inaccurate for only linking to one of the articles, when in fact I linked to neither of them, but a completely different one.

Surprisingly tabitha I would agree with you about how vertical disease control programs implemented in isolation from the existing health system are not ideal. For an Indian villager polio is but one of a multitude of illnesses and conditions, and he or she may indeed prefer ensuring the local clinic has a trained nurse and there are no stock outs of anti-malarials or amoxycillin for saving childrens lives. I'd like to see these kinds of programs integrated with local health systems as one component of overall health system strengthening. Vaccines are important and relatively easy to implement through vertical strategies as well as being very tempting for donors as they are so cost effective in saving lives with tangible results. Health systems strengthening takes longer but I agree it is essential and should not be ignored in the race to vaccinate.

Saintly
71 cases plus four times as many controls is pretty good for a case control study. Since you said that 5-7% of autism is triggered by the mmr (without any scientific evidence) wouldn't you therefore expect there to be about 4 cases of the mmr triggering autism? In any case, no one is considering the study in isolation - no one reaches a decision on the basis of one study alone. But it adds to the overwhelming body of evidence that the mmr does not cause autism. Yet another nail in the coffin.

Personally, I prefer to rely on experts. People with years of training, years of experience in highly specialized areas. Understanding how vaccines work, whether they even can cause autism requires knowledge of epidemiology, statistics, immunology, virology, pathology, psychiatry, pediatrics, neurology. I have expertise in one of these areas, you may have expertise in another, but unless you are some paragon of learning, you cannot possibly have knowledge of them all. I think the hubris to imagine you are capable of fully understanding primary sources outside your own area is shocking and very dangerous. Far better someone who admits they don't know maths and uses a calculator than someone who insists that 2 and 2 equal 5 which is exactly what is happening here.

I also think it ironic that the autism community is painted as being so enlightened. Unfortunately, the autism community has been one of the most exploited by quacks, vaccines no exception. Ask dr Michael Fitzpatrick about it.

I think cautious vaccinators, questioning vaccinator and thoughtful vaccinator all describe me very well thanks lavolcan. I'm very cautious, very thoughtful and I definitely question. I just came to the right a different decision to the anti vax lobby.

Tabithas what's your problem with aluminium in vaccines? Did you breast feed your kids? There's aluminium in breast milk ( way more than a kid will ever get in vaccines). Or is the name just a bit scary? The dose makes the poison.

By the way saintly,my belief in scientific principles certainly does not affect the way I see pagwatch's story. I take it at face value. In terms of why and how to fit this in to what the scientific evidence says I think that there obviously was a temporal association which could possibly be causal but is highly unlikely to be causal. Pagwatch's herself says she only observed the temporal association but has no idea regarding the causal one.

Aside to sossiges - yes indeed. My mistake came in when the link failed and I typed in polio to the journal's search - two papers came up neither of which were your link....but I'm afraid, the point remains that to appreciate complicated areas of study, often involving multidisciplines, quoting the odd paper out of context of the scientific research can be misleading. In partcular when the person reading the paper has an idea formed before reading ('I'm not keen on vaccines' 'I mistrust the medical profession' 'I believe MMR triggers autism') their subsequent interpretation can very often be flawed. As happens on these threads all the time.

I've already talked about Pagwatch saintly. If I were her I would be thinking very long and hard about vaccinating the rest of my DC's. Thoughts that would go through my head: probably no causal link but nonetheless it's remotely plausible the family have a unique predisposition to the MMR. None of us are immune to the pulls on the heart rather than reason. When I hear most of the stories wrt MMR and autism, they really suggest nothing more than temporal correlation tbh (human brains are predisposed to making links) so yes, in general my biases leads me to dismiss anecdotal evidence. When I put my logic hat on and read the research I find a lot of papers and reviews that put any doubts to rest. Lots of papers factor in under-reporting, have highly stringent saftey criteria and report incidents of vaccine damage. I find this reassuring. I find it reassuring that the Cockhrane review (the gold standard) found no evidence of a link with autism. I too am a cautious vaccinator and so far, all vaccines proposed for my DS I've taken. I don't think all vaccines are perfect. I don't think all research is good. I don't consider myself a pro-vaxer at all costs - fwiw, I find health professionals (in general) treat people like idiots when it comes to these sorts of things, something which does little to help the vaccination cause imo.

Elaine As I'm sure you are well aware, our stomachs act as a barrier to aluminium that is ingested.

And yet a significant amount passes into the bloodstream. Don't believe all you read in the crankosphere.

alzheimers.org.uk/site/scripts/documents_info.php?documentID=99

Seriously, this isn't a "cranky" website, is it?

"Only a minute proportion of the aluminium we ingest from these various sources is absorbed by the body, and even this small fraction is usually excreted in the urine or harmlessly deposited in bone, which acts as a 'sink' to remove aluminium."

"?There have been many experimental studies on animals and on isolated cells showing that aluminium has toxic effects on the nervous system, but in almost all cases the doses of aluminium used were much higher than those occurring naturally in tissues (Gitelman 1988)."

I agree, it's not absorbed the body even if in the bloodstream. Most is excreted by the kidneys. Only a small amount accumulates, the vast majority from food.

And a minute amount from vaccine. Surely the Alzheimer's society would raise concerns about vaccines if they felt they were an issue.

It's only the crankosphere which thinks aluminium in vaccines is an issue