inquest rules Gareth Colfer-Williams death was complications of measles

[meditrina]

I thought I'd post this here as this poor man's death has been mentioned on a number of threads in this forum.

On 1 July, his inquest found that he died of natural causes, from disease: specifically giant cell pneumonia, a complication of measles.

(The Welsh epidemic is officially over, as there were no new cases in June).

Well precisely - this poor man had giant cell pneumonia which is associated with fairly extreme immune suppression (and measles and vitamin deficiency).

To say that he died of measles complications is of course true but not the whole truth. The whole truth is that he was vulnerable to disease due to a number of nutrition and health issues and the drugs he was taking for them. He was also misdiagnosed by the various health professionals he saw. Again pre-existing health issues played a role here with doctors assuming that the symptoms he showed were related to his existing issues. This man was ill and extremely vulnerable. My opinion is that he was badly let down by health services - there was a measles epidemic going on and this adult would have been in a very precarious position with regards to being able to cope with the disease. Any rash should have been investigated. Measles infection does not always present the typical rash (particularly in adults and the immune compromised) and medical professionals surely know this? Indeed atypical rash can be a marker for giant cell pneumonia

He was let down by those who created the scaremongering around mmr. He died from a complication of a preventable disease.
Love the amateur diagnosticians who think they know more than his gp. Posters who weren't in the situation and know nothing of what was said when he went to the gp. It doesn't look like the inquest criticized the gp in anyway either.

He was vulnerable and vaccines protect those that are vulnerable by herd immunity. In SW there was no herd immunity because of the MMR scare created by Andrew Wakefield and his followers who are still at it today.

Ah but we know these arguments off by heart, don't we bruffin?

One could equally say that he was failed by the government's refusal to provide single measles vaccines.

Or he was failed by the government's and manufacturer's failure to provide adequate safety documentation and reassurance for the triple vaccine's safety record and testing.

You may think that the MMR is perfectly safe, but lots of people don't and they don't for good reason. Trying to make this all about one man is silly. It isn't - it is about tens of thousands of children across the globe with unexplained health issues following MMR vaccination.

This won't go away. scapegoat Wakefield or no scapegoat Wakefield.

And I don't believe there is a single parent on earth who would vaccinate their child in order to protect others if they thought there was any real chance of that vaccine damaging their child. Moralising about 'herd immunity' is a luxury not everybody has.

'tens of thousands of children across the globe with unexplained health issues following MMR' - what a load of bollocks.

Lot of obfuscating here. Do you believe Wakefield was on to something or not, beachcomber?

JoTheHot calling other people's children's health issues 'bollocks' is really really unpleasant.

Thoroughly unpleasant.

Your question about Dr Wakefield is extremely vague. Are you talking about his work with Crohn's disease? Or his work demonstrating gut disease in a sub group of autistic children? Or his work demonstrating digestive issues in autistic children? Or his work demonstrating how GFCF diets can help some autistic children? Or his work on the gut brain link? Or his work on vitamin B12? Or his listening to parents who say their child went downhill after having an MMR vaccine?

Quite clearly Dr Wakefield is onto a lot of things WRT to the physical health profiles of autistic children. A great deal of what he says and works on is no longer controversial. Thankfully. Thankfully he doesn't think these children's health issues are 'bollocks'.

Not sure what he has to do with the topic of the actual thread. Some people seem to get really fixated on him though...

Ah but we know these arguments off by heart, don't we bruffin?

What nonsense, plain common sense. Andrew Wakefield work on crohn diserase has been discredited by many studies and most recently by Buie,

You are willfully misunderstanding me. I did not say anyone's ill health was bollocks. It is your ridiculous and groundless statement linking widespread unexplained ill health to MMR that is bollocks.

Do you believe Wakefield was on to something when he linked autism to MMR? But then you already knew that is what I was asking.

measles suppress the immune system, pre-existing conditions can exacerbate this, but wild measles virus causes a kind of mini AIDS...

JoTheHot I am not at all willfully misunderstanding you. At all.

There are tens of thousands of reports of children becoming ill in not only similar ways but in a novel manner following their MMR vaccination. If you say "bollocks" to that then you are saying bollocks to their illness.

And now you confound things by saying that it is "ridiculous" and "groundless" to say that these children exist and became ill following MMR vaccination.

A suggestion for you. Try to forget Wakefield the scapegoat and concentrate on the children.

What do you give as an alternative explanation for their ill health if their parents are wrong about it being connected to MMR vaccination.

I'm all fucking ears...

And CatherinaJTV I don't have a great deal of time for you.

Considering that you have a blog with a frankly bizarre level of pro vaccine rhetoric and that you hang out on MN advising people to get their kids vaccinated at all costs, I wonder how impartial your posts can be.

Beachcomber, don't comment then, before you spread the untruth.

Agree that he was let down.

Disagree that you can blame Wakefield for this

It's odd to blame Wakefield. Do people honestly think it came out of nowhere, no worries about MMR and then wham, Andrew Wakefield, wham, suddenly people's children regress after MMR? And since then, with everything that's happened to him, he would have been long forgotten if regressions weren't still happening out there in the real world. Anyway I thought that gut disease he identified has now been recognised in America and there's a drug out for it. Perhaps he didn't get everything wrong.

Crumbled - exactly my thoughts - Wakefield's research tapped into an existing fear, and if those fears hadn't already been there, that particular piece of research would be long forgotten. At a guess, I would expect in 10, 20 years time, there will be some truth found in his research, which possibly will only be relevant to those children with existing undiagnosed disorders.

Medicine is unfortunately littered with examples of people who have been villified and later found to be correct.

I always wonder why they don't ask parents why they don't like the MMR - at a guess I would suspect that many feel that 3 vaccines in one is unecessary at that stage, covering two other diseases which are almost certainly going to be mild in a small child. Many of the current parents will have had the single measles vaccine themselves; it worked OK, so why change, would be their reasoning?

The regression was happening in the real world was happening long before MMR. In Japan they stopped using mmr and the number of cases carried on rising
If you had bothered to read the AW court case then you will see that none of the children involved in that were fine one day, had mmr then regressed the next day or even in a week later. There are no mechanism for the mmr to cause regression one month or 6 months later, or whenever.

Yes you can blame Wakefield. Nearly half the measles cases were in teenagers who should have been vaccinated around the height of the scaremongering.

La Volcan - Why play to peoples ignorance by giving singles. There is no evidence whatsoever that single vaccines are safer. The only cases of anaphylaxis to mmr have been in singles given at private clinics, which is either the case of a something wrong with the vaccine or the parents being given the wrong advice by the clinic. The only physicians that recommend single vaccines make money selling single vaccines
Even the recommendation for the management of mitochondrial disease

"Immunizations may be administered individually or in limited batches to reduce metabolic stress. Though there is a lack of evidence to support this practice, such an option may be an acceptable alternative for parents and patients with concerns about immunizations, avoiding the risk of forgoing immunizations altogether."

Mumps has a risk of deafness and encephylitis which is far less than the risk of the vaccine. When we relied on vaccinating girls for rubella, there were still cases of CRS. Rubella is not a childhood illness. Why do you think that so many pregnant women caught it when there was an epidemic. It was not that easy to catch as a child because it happens in epidemics on a
Have you seen the real effects of rubella

Rubella bulge classes
That doesnt include the larger numbers of miscarriages and still births. I

I have read about Andrew Wakefield, I'm aware of how complex the 12 child case study is. Although I'm pretty sure there'll be people here who know a lot more than me. :) But I've also read about many cases of regression, and also about cases where brain injury is accepted for compensation after MMR and the brain injury can bear autistic symptoms. By the way I'm not convinced by the Japan study, I believe the Japanese schedule is very different with the vaccines given much closer together, within a matter of days or weeks. I think the idea of MMR giving a protective effect against autistic disorders is completely ludicrous. Otherwise in the past 25 years we would have seen the incidence of the disorders drop from 1 in 5 thousand of 1 in 10 thousand to almost a vanishing level! They wouldn't be happening at all! In fact as we all know that hasn't happened and the incidence of disorders has multiplied hundreds of fold.

I don't think I mentioned safety Bruffin, so I don't know why you raise the issue.

The policy re rubella infuriates me. I caught it at 14. The first time I was tested officially for immunity was when I was 27 and 13 weeks pregnant. A bit late then! There were ample opportunities to discuss the issue because I had spent a number of years trotting off to the Family Planning clinic for my supply of the Pill.

My daughter is an adult and has had the single rubella vaccine, as was the policy at the time. Had anyone told her that her immunity could wear off? No. Had anyone offered a test for immunity? No. Despite having the same need to collect her supply of the Pill as I did, so presumably a similar number of clinic visits.

The trouble is being 'all fucking ears' just isn't sufficient. You need to critically digest what you hear, and that's what you're singularly failing to do beachcomber. Unless, of course, you have a reference statistically linking widespread unexplained illness to MMR.

I don't think you understand by the way, Bruffin, about blaming Wakefield. There were plenty of parents who were talking about how their child had regressed. Plenty of parents talking to the papers about it. Across the UK and in South Wales of course. But the reports began before Andrew Wakefield's study. That's what I mean when I say you can't blame Andrew Wakefield. He wasn't alone. And let's not forget, every parent puts their child first. Everyone has a right to put their child first. Nobody has to vaccinate for other people nor should they. People have responsibility for their own health and for their children's health. Measles isn't eradicated and it wouldn't be, even if everyone was vaccinated. I totally agree with Beachcomber about the responsibility of the health professionals involved. It seems to me this outbreak became political, or was highlighted as a political thing, or a propaganda drive, and I don't understand what happened or why this man wasn't better looked after.

The regression was happening in the real world was happening long before MMR. I don't actually think this is true. Nobody's saying the MMR invented autistic disorders, but I think the type of regression that began to happen was new. Also the disease which Wakefield identified was new.

...the incidence diagnosis of disorders has multiplied hundreds of fold

Jotheproblem with posts like yours is the demand for a reference above everything else. You could have a million parents knocking on your door saying the same thing, and you still wouldn't believe them if you didn't have a link.

Rubbish JotheHot re incidence/diagnosis. Extraordinary.

diagnosis of disorders has multiplied hundreds of fold

Diagnosis may have improved but I for one, don't think it's the whole story. I can immediately think of two people who are severly autistic; I don't recall any from my childhood. Maybe they were locked away in Institutions, or maybe they just didn't exist?

I don't think it's the whole story either, partly because I can't imagine any reason why out of nowhere people suddenly started diagnosing autistic disorders by the tens and hundreds of thousands.

The thing is there aren't millions of parents knocking on my door. In fact, there aren't any at all. It is true that I think an estimate of illness due to MMR should be based on someone having actually counted the number of people involved, as opposed a wild speculative guess.