Anyone have advice on MMR issue???

[opinionsrus]

I know that this is an "old" topic, but I am a first time mum and TBH do not know a great deal on the topic.

Please can anyone tell me? Which is the greater "risk"? The MMR jab given at 15 mths, or the booster at age 4?

Don't really know if it works like that at all so apologies in advance if that sounds a bit dumb. If your child was going to have a reaction,would it be after the inital jab, if at all?

Any comments are greatly appreciated so many thanks in advance to those of you who answer....

It is fairly easy to spot the subgroup btw- they tend to have seizures following MMR, or encephalitis then lose skills. It's not actually that difficult to spot.

"they are studies on hundreds or thousands of children...children who have had the jab to no ill effect."

Which is EXACTLY what you would expect if the Wakefield hypothesis (which is now that a small subgroup of the population has had their autism triggered by MMR) is true.

At the risk of sticking my oar in...

I think that flumpytina is trying to say that for the majority of children the MMR poses no risk at all because that is what the research says. However the hypothesis that jimjams proposes is that for a very, very small subgroup of children MMR may precipitate the development of autism. The research available doesn't, at present, address this issue very well.

I think that these two points can be expressed by (note figures entirely made up off the top of my head and not accurate in any way):

If you vaccinated 100,000 children and 3 of them developed autism that the parents and clinicians felt was jab related then it could be considered that the risk of jab related autism was 0.003%.

What, perhaps, is a truer reflection of the risks is that there were 5 children in that 100,000 who were vulnerable to this particular environmental hit of whom 3 were affected. So the risk to those 5 was 60% but the risk to the other 99,997 was zero.

Feel free to say if I'm talking boolocks .

Or bollocks .

Yep (although I think the numbers are slightly large than that), but at the moment there is no way (or any attempt at) identifying those at risk before the jab.

Also the risk for an indvidual may change, depending on things like age given, and other factors such a previous exposure ot thimerosal/ incubation of chickenpox etc. Even a suscpetible child is not doomed to have to develop autism following the jab, their risk can be decreased (another possibility- give vitamin A before the jab-measles needs lots of vitamin A to deal wiht it- a subgroup of the autistic population have been shown to doo very odd things with retinol- see Megson's work).

Do you see what I mean? I really object to saying there is no risk- because the research does not show that- especially because no attempt is even made to identify those who are potentially at risk. Those that do then have the seizures, the regression the bowel problems are routinely told, without any investigation- that it cannot possibly be related.

Although when faced with a totally unvaccinated ds3 in hospital - all doctors I saw were understanding when told why.

What's 5% of 1 in 86- that will give the absolute risk (or has my maths let me down?).

But then you need to look at individual risk factors. Crohns disease in the family, up the risk, lots of autoimmunity, up the risk, sibling with autism- up the risk (although that aboslute risk will vary between families). Ds3 has minor gut abnormalities AND and autistic sibling so I guess his risk (not just from MMR) is high compared to Joe Public. Although he hasn't had thimerosal or antibiotics so that will reduce his risk. I don;t think his risk is zero though.

name change, I can not belive you are thinking with such clarity at eleven on a saturday night. Mat leave has indeed altered your cognitive thinking!!!
PS sorry about the halloween name am going to wait till its appropriate to be festive.

What I will say is its interesting to see jim jams patient input the same data (with any relvent updates) when ever she can. Everytime she does she is usually (and often aggressivly) misinterpreted by people giving the same arguments.
"wakefield was a crap scientist"
"he worked for the drugs company that developed single vaccines"
" it was the mercury that did it and they;ve taken that out of vaccines now"
"autisimis only rising cuase its techniques of diagnosis are better"
and so on and so forth. (These are all arguments that I have heard health visitors use!!!)
I was embarrsed to read the agressivness of some of the posts as I recongnised my own initial reaction to jimjams information (a long time ago).
I think jimjams is a very kind person who takes a lot of time and shows a lot of patience to share information unbiasly on a subject which must be heart wrenching for her, and I am sorry that she is met with these reactions time and time again when never once advises for or against vacination!
As a fellow health practitioner I embrase the information that jim jams has taken the time to share. she helped me to make a hugely more informed decision than my health visitor could. But I come from a medical back ground, and needed that level of information.
to a non clinical person understanding the info, I think namechange surmises it beautifully!
There is no right or wrong answer yet. There is information. Factual information that should be shared freely and unbiasly as that is the only way we can truely learn.

Back to the crap telly on a saturday night!

this is a bit excitable but summarises Megson's work.

Interesting. We had ds1 on cod liver oil for a long time. All his (what we call) "funny eyes" stopped. He stopped holding things to the side of his eyes and running them backwards and forwards. He stopped flicking his head along straight edges, he stopped opening and closing doors to look at them out of the corner of his eyes.

Then he started refusing cod liver oil. I tried injecting it into food- he would eat around it. He cut down his already limited diet, so I back off. 8 weeks after stopping cod liver oil funny eyec came back. 2 years later it's still there, but he;s eating more widely and I'll try introducing it again.

Thank you chaps, you're kind. And namechanged I do agree with what you have written. Just wish we could identify the ones who are at a - say- 60% risk..... Of course if problems with vitmain A metabolism are causing problems then wild measles would also be risky (which I think Wakefield would agree with)- but maybe singels would be safer......

Just to add to ~Flumpytina- there is no epidemiological evidence to back up the idea of there being a small % of the autistic population affected because it is very difficult to do (for the reasons I gave earlier quoted from Lathe- also see Wakefield's presentation I linked to). You're hard pushed to find a large enough unvaccinated group. There is however the direct evidence from looking at the children. They do appear to have measles virus in the gut and CNS (when control's don't), they do appear to have a specific gut pathology (the existence of which apparently has never been challenged), and they do appear to share a similar medical history. They also share common biomedical markers (no IAG in the urine for example, which can be unusual in regressive autism). None of which proves causation, but equally cannot be described as "no" evidence. In my mind its more valid than looking at millions of children and asking completely the wrong question.

One group did set out to examine the subgroup hypothesis, then for some reason published without including that (I think because they couldn't get the data). That's in Wakefield's presentation if you want to follow it up.

Jimjams, re singles and wild virus; do you know of any evidence that suggests that singles may be better? I've not been convinced of anything. Sometimes I wonder if the "singles are safer" pov comes from those private clinics who charge an absolute fortune to administer them. I can't think how the research could be done as I think that you would need even larger populations than you would need to identify the possible tiny at risk group. I think the same goes for wild virus.

Agree with you that would be hard to do, but autistic enterocolitis appears to be specifically asociated with MMR. There are aslo similarities in the physiology of children who regressed following MMR and Gulf War veterans with Gulf War syndrome. UNfortunately Aloha no longer posts as she knew quite a ot about GWS. I do find it interesting the the MoD advised thart for GW2 multiple vaccinations were avoided where possible- especially given the apparent similarities in physiology.

There is so much that is physiologically "wrong" in someone with autism it becomes hard to pick out cause and effect. However they do often appear to have problems with viruses, they also appear to have problems with detoxifying heavy metals - and if you start to add early exposure to thimerosal into the MMR equation you begin to come up theoretical reasons why giving more than one live virus at the same time may be problematic.

Wakefield suggested switching to singles whilst further MMR safety trials were carried out (he's never suggested not vaccination, and the Cochrane reposrt has noted that the safety trials were inadequate). He did that because he'd never seen this novel form of enterocolitis before (and had been a paediatric gastroenterologist for ??? a good number of years) and parents were linking the start of symptoms with MMR. He'd never come across that whilst single jabs were beiing used.

Also there is evidence that the severity of symptoms and the likelihood of recovery is brand specific.

Really to be honest I'd read the Wakefield PP presentation I linked to earlier. He goes into all this. Maybe not the gulf war stuff, but the ARU has a little bit about that.

Would also recommend Richard Lathe's book for anyone who is interested in the biomedical side of autism. It is incredibly complicated (wish all paediatricians would at least flick through it really as it does gather everything into one place, and shows how complicated it all is - and gives some hint as to why you can't always sedate autistic children etc- really in the case of regressive autism - whatever its triggered by- the whole physiology is up the creek).

Oh - this may be a bit of a dead end but there may be a link between catching chickenpox and having MMR in close proximity. There appeared to be an asociation but I'm not sure it was significant. That continues I think to be considered at times, whilst being thoguth perhapps unlikely. Also some evidence that catching wild combinations of these in the same year can increase the risk of autsim, but would take me a while to refind that paper (and old one that predates all the MMR stuff).

very simplified but info from thoughtful house, always worth looking at visceral as well, although the page hasn't been updated for a while. But really I'd recommend the PP presentation from A1.

very simplified but info from thoughtful house, always worth looking at visceral as well, although the page hasn't been updated for a while. But really I'd recommend the PP presentation from A1.

JimJams
av
Can I ask you a quick question. My son has has the singles and will need booster soon, do you think it is really necessary for him to have this. I am a reg on jabs website and have been reading lots of posts (esp fom Gus the Fus), have seen u on there also, and would quite like to avoid any more mmr injections. thanks for your time

Gosh - it really is no wonder that there are a significant number of parents who do nothing...it's all blooming confusing and you're 'damned if you do and damned if you don't'! This is by far the most interesting and 'well-read' MMR discussion I've seen - so am I getting this right?
To the vast majority of the child population, MMR poses very, very little to no risk, but to a very minute population, the risk from MMR could be high - but you don't know whether your child for certain is in this group? This has to be weighed against the risk and likely severity of catching measles, mumps and rubella in this or visited countries (and when 'catching' said diseases must be higher likelihood now than 20 yrs ago?) It must also be weighed against the risks to suceptible others (pregnant women etc)of catching and being affected by MM and R - social responsibility (if you like) and personal risk included into the mixing pot. Bl..dy hell it's hard! My hat off to all of you.