Starting to have MMR doubts and panicking

[SneezingwakestheJesus]

I had finally decided to give my dd the MMR and she has her appointment next week. But now I'm having doubts again and panicking. Her uncle has autism and his mum is utterly convinced it happened after the MMR. I know that study was a fake/discredited etc but I'm finding it hard to see past her, and other parents online, strong belief that the signs of autism appeared overnight in their children. And those recent court cases where parents were given compensation on the basis that the vaccines their children had may be linked to their condition worry me too.

What if some autism is caused by the vaccine in some way? What if there is a genetic predisposition to having autism and all it needs is a trigger? What if my dd has a genetic predisposition from that side of the family?

I know I sound paranoid but I'm really struggling with this. On one hand I could give her a vaccination that will protect her from diseases but isn't guaranteed not to harm her. On the other, I don't give her the vaccination but she may catch one of these diseases and may be ever worse off than if the vaccine did harm her. I'm so torn and muddled about it.

I just don't know what to do and I don't know what I expect from posting here but I can't talk to my family about it.

Goombay those figures dont show all the complications

I had these figures at the time

"thirty-three countries in the WHO European Region are also experiencing higher number of outbreaks. There have been 6 reported deaths from the virus, 360 cases of severe pneumonia and 12 cases of encephalitis that has not occurred in the U.S. Ten thousand cases have been reported in Europe from January to April, 2011."

that is a death rate of 1 in 1666
and serious complication rate of 1 in 26"

this looks at the whole outbreak

"Overall, with more than 30,000 cases of measles in Europe in 2011, 8 deaths, 27 cases of measles encephalitis, and 1,482 cases of pneumonia, most cases were in unvaccinated (82%) or incompletely vaccinated (13%) people.

France was the hardest hit, with over 15,000 cases of measles and at least 6 deaths last year, 651 cases of severe pneumonia and 16 cases of encephalitis."

I can give some limited insight into the courts issue. A judge is just a clever person generally speaking. They have a mix of views on different subjects as does everyone else. There are thousands of judges in the US, all of whom will have different political and other persuasions. Judges will be influenced by their own personal views on things, their experiences (do they know people with autism?), the quality of the lawyers representing each side and likely also how sorry they feel for the individual affected and the availability of funds to help that person. Judges are meant to be objective but no-one, not even the brightest people, can be entirely so.

In civil cases, judges make decisions on the basis of whether they think something is more likely than not ie a 51% likelihood of something having happened in their opinion is enough. Very different from the criminal "beyond reasonable doubt" - this would be 95% plus. This gives them much more flexibility.

I know nothing about this US judge or the Italian one and I have not read their judgments. But what I can say is that just because they are judges, it doesn't mean they are right that the mmr caused autism in the cases they judged or in general. All judges, like doctors or anyone else, get things wrong sometimes. I know a few and they would be the first to admit that.

The best analogy would be asking 1000 doctors about how to treat a particular common condition. Most would broadly agree but you would get a few dissenters. Of course the dissenters could be right (it is impossible to rule that out entirely) but the overwhelming likelihood is that they are not.

What I can say is that if there was good evidence that MMR caused autism in many cases, the global courts would be FULL of these cases. In the UK at least, the judges are entirely separate from the govt and most would have no hesitation finding against the govt on an issue like this. Solicitors would be advertising for MMR victims on a no win no fee basis if they thought there was a real prospect of winning them.

Oh ok Bruffin...I didn't realise it wasn't an accurate picture. What on earth is the point of a stats map that doesn't show the facts?

Goombay good question for the daily mail! Re stats map

Newspapers are good at using stats to promote particular editorial campaigns - just look at crime stats

Sneezing, nobody can tell you what the right decision is. You either have the risk of the vaccination or the risk of the disease. It's up to you to weigh up which one is less of a risk in your child's case.

There are still some very good, reputable doctors who provide single vaccines but it is important to go to one who can show evidence that they store the vaccines correctly and that they have been stored correctly according to the manufacturer's instructions throughout.

Of course the dissenters could be right (it is impossible to rule that out entirely) but the overwhelming likelihood is that they are not.

This isn't necessarily so. Sometimes the dissenters can't get their voices heard. Think of this week's news about delayed cord clamping. Immediate clamping has been going on for 50 years and although it was indicated in some individual cases it largely just became a matter of policy, as this article from The Guardian shows.

Who could say that there is no room for doubt with vaccination policies?

"For years, government health officials and most other medical authorities have dismissed the idea that autism might be linked to childhood vaccines; and the special court set up by Congress to compensate people hurt by vaccines has denied thousands of claims over the past decade by parents who have contended that their children developed autism because of their inoculations. But a new report in a New York law school journal, the Pace Environmental Law Review, [67] could re-ignite the often-inflammatory debate over the issue. Based on a sampling of cases in which plaintiffs won settlements or awards in vaccine court, the authors found that many of the victims demonstrated evidence of autism even though?as a legal tactic?their lawsuits emphasized other injuries"

This is the link:
www.vaccinationcouncil.org/2011/06/01/vaccines-and-brain-inflammation/

we've seen that website before, it's just a rabid antivaxxer site, and not at all reliable.

Rosi7 -i wouldn't rely on judges or lawyers as arbiters of good science - e.g. the hundreds of death row inmates whose sentences have been overturned after years of appeal. And as another poster recently noted, Italian courts aren't great when it comes to science - they just convicted several seismologists for failing to predict an earthquake.

Your data is Correlation - not causation. I can give you a couple of other causes of autism, based on correlation

organic food

Media stories - Nate Silver in his latest books also does a fab graph showing an almost one to one corresondence between the nuber of children who are diagnosed as autistic and the frequency with which the term is used in American newspapers with both increasing recently (with a slight lag between media mentions, then diagnosis)

You'd never say organic food causes autism, or that media stories do, but anti vacc campaigners when they see the relationship between MMR and autism have no hestitation.

You want more examples - visited www.correlated.org/

'Sometimes the dissenters can't get their voices heard'.

This quote illustrates well why the anti's stay stuck in their rut. A vaccine isn't safe because the authorities say so, or dangerous because the dissenters say it's not. It's safe because that is what the data show. The dissenters collect little data, never use controls and do no statistical analyses. There dissent is devoid of rigour, until they fix this, no-one will, and no-one should listen to them. They're just a disparate bunch of people lazily clinging to a bunch of unproven hypotheses.

Sorry, JoTheHot, I don't agree with that and nor was I just talking about vaccines.

They're just a disparate bunch of people lazily clinging to a bunch of unproven hypotheses. Just love the sweeping generalisations here.
Time may tell.

Rather than just tossing back knee-jerk piss-poor commentaries like 'I don't agree' and 'sweeping generalisations', why don't you actually go to the effort of properly explaining yourself, and then back your views up with something.

What don't you agree with? Everything in my post? Do you know any dissenter who has done some proper stats? Time may tell what? You either are clinging to unproven hypotheses or you aren't; time can't change that.

My DS has autism and I do not think it was caused by the MMR, it's definitely genetic in our family as DH has two cousins with autism and my sister and nephew have asbergers. There is also probably an environmental trigger. I really don't believe it is the MMR but if I am wrong then I would much rather have my beautiful boy the way he is an healthy!
It is a worry and I won't lie...I did worry about getting DS2 vaccinated with the MMR but decided to have him vaccinated in the end.

JoTheHot. Is it a crime to disagree? I specifically instanced something which is nothing to do with vaccines, early cord clamping. Policy now is on the point of being looked at and possibly revised. This is an area where some medical staff were out of step with what is at present the accepted practice. Although on another thread a poster (a midwife I think) said that she asked about this policy 5 years ago and was looked at as though she was on another planet, but now those same dissenters have begun to make their voices heard.

So were these HCPs just a lazy disparate bunch who clung to a bunch of unproven hypotheses. Or were these people who said look, the current policy isn't optimal, let's try something different?

If this can happen in one area of medicine, could it not happen in another?

It's not a crime to disagree. It's lazy and unproductive to blandly say you disagree, without saying what you disagree with, and why you disagree with it. You still haven't done this. If you re-read my post you'll see I make no comment on HCPs' views on cord clamping. This is after all a vaccine thread.

That dissidents sometimes turn out to be right, does not mean that dissidents are right in general. The vast majority of dissidents turn out to be wrong. Vaccine dissidents are no different. In fact they're worse. Not only do they not have anything mathematically rigorous to support their views, they mostly can't even be bothered to look for such support.

Yes, it's a vaccine thread. My original posting was in answer to the person who said that there were a minority of dissenters who were likely to be wrong. That was a perfectly valid viewpoint but not one I shared and I said why I thought so. I felt that it was perfectly valid to say that other areas of medicine could have dissenters who were eventually proved right.

As an example, I talked about a different area of medicine where right now, the accepted orthodoxy is undergoing re-appraisal. This group of people questioning the orthodxoy were no doubt in a minority. I asked why this couldn't be applied to other areas of medicine which would include vaccines.

If you think that is 'lazy and unproductive' then so be it, I don't think I can explain any more to you.

I don't think anyone can conclude that the dissenters are absolutely wrong. Nothing in life is certain. We can only make decisions based upon what we know at the moment. Who knows we might discover one day that apples cause heart attacks. But for the moment, there is no evidence to suggest they do.

I would say that the dissenters have had their voices heard pretty loudly in this case. Wakefield, for instance, has very definitely been heard.

I would go with my gut reaction and I know that if my DC cut their leg on a rusty wire I would want them to have a tetanus shot - I wouldn't take the risk of not - therefore I am pro vaccine.

unfortunately the consequences of the disenters actions are playing out in Wales -

and unfortunately they won't accept that it is a direct consequence of refusing vaccines.

Oh so cut to the chase, it's the FAULT of people who don't feel safe having the vaccine that other people are getting ill. Is that what you're saying?

It is a herd thing. It then protects those that can't have the vaccine.

So what about those people who had the vaccine but then catch the disease?

You need enough to have the vaccine-we no longer have polio, smallpox, diphtheria -and children don't die of tetanus.

As I said early-reading the logbook of a primary school in Victorian times the school regularly had to close because of epidemics and was then disinfected before they went back some weeks later-sadly not all the children, some died.
When I was at school it never closed for illness like that and it certainly doesn't today.

JoTheHot
"we've seen that website before, it's just a rabid antivaxxer site, and not at all reliable".

Interesting opinion - but not more than that.