'Unprecedented' rise in measles

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link

The BBC this morning have a story about an unprecedented rise in measles cases over the last year.
I'll C+P to save you clicking the link

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There is an "unprecedented increase" in measles cases in England and Wales, experts report.

Data from the Health Protection Agency showed there were 1,217 cases of measles from January to November 2008.

And 75% of the 115 cases diagnosed in November were outside the traditional hotspot of London - in the north west, west midlands and south east.

The HPA's Dr Mary Ramsay said the rise in cases was due to "relatively low" MMR uptake over the past decade.

link www.mumsnet.com/Talk/in_the_news/678924-More-criminal-irresponsibility-by-the-media

What establishment was that Thumbwitch?

Daftpunk- shake.

A lot of the info about this is about politics, conflict of interest, influence and spin. One doesn't have to be a scientist to understand it IYSWIM.

It wasn't me who made the 'I'm alright Jack" comment although I do sometimes feel that this is how a lot of people who deny the vaccine/autism link come across if they present what are personal opinions as fact. No hard feelings.

As for Goldacre, it seems to me that he never writes anything terribly critical or cutting edge about pharma considering what could be written. He is much more scathing towards those he calls 'woos' or 'quacks'. The way he trashes anything alternative in medicine certainly fits in with the agenda of the organisation he is tied to.

Here is another reference to his ties with Wessely, the IoP, Maudsley Hospital, etc. It's from the BMJ Rapid Responses which are reviewed before they're are published so it is a reliable source.

Policywonk, I think Goldacre does a very good job of spreading misinformation about vaccine damage, MMR data and Dr Wakefield's work all whilst managing to mock the parents of sick children. Seems like a job well done to me.

The fact that he allows personal attack and mockery of the posters from a well known support website for parents of vaccine damaged children on his bad science forum shows the sort of level he works at. It is lowdown behaviour that a professional impartial journalist should not tolerate IMO.

And why does he never refer to the establishment he works for?

beachcomber... no, it wasn't you that made that comment...sorry.

No probs. Thanks.

I agree about Ben Goldacre and his ilk. You might as well dig a hole and lie down in it if you accept his view that alternative medicine is all quackery and nothing works. It also denies what different cultures and countries have been doing for thousands of years to maintain good health. That thing Science Sense in the Media or whatever has had a field day rubbishing de-toxing, yet fasting has been used by humans for years and years to promote good health. Goldacre et al say that's what your liver is for (removing toxins from the body) - yes, and that's why you're stuffed if your liver gives out on you because you haven't looked after it. Of course buying expensive fluffy pink de-tox luxury packs from Boots isn't going to help much, unless it starts you on a road to more serious stuff, but the gimmicky and the time-honoured shouldn't be lumped together as laughable.

Re. Goldacre: firstly, you could well be right about the tone of the posts on the blog. I've only looked at the blog in passing, but Habbibu once said on here that the posts have a very aggressive and sneering tone, and I'm happy to take her (and your) word for it.

But as far these dark insinuations of dishonesty and undeclared funding are concerned, the sources you've given contain nothing but speculation. Isn't that the kind of reasoning that you reject when it comes to the MMR?

monkeytrousers I am not prepared to disclose as it would give my identity away to anyone who googles it, sorry.

I have some sympathy with his stance on some of the media "quacks", but he is a real "chuck the baby out with the bath water" when it comes to complementary stuff of any kind. One of the topics that incensed me was his bashing of Brain Gym, or educational kinesiology. So many teachers wrote into him saying that it worked really well "in the field" that he felt the need to write about it again, savaging them all as gullible morons. (paraphrasing - that was the effect of his words).

He is in cahoots with Prof Colqhoun and Edzard Ernst, who have made it their mission in life to virtually criminalise any form of alternative therapy - including osteopaths and chiropracters, who are only manipulating your mind and purse, not your back at all, apparently .

Yes he occasionally attacks the establishment, but not NEARLY as often as he attacks the CAM professions (oh sorry, can't be called profession according to him because all are unscientific quacks)

Not getting what you mean about rejecting a certain kind of reasoning re MMR Policywonk, sorry.

The kind of reasoning that I reject when it comes to MMR is one that declares that thousands of children suspected of MMR damage and who have never been clinically examined for their suspected condition as not suffering from that condition because that condition doesn't exist and can't be caused by MMR anyway because we have never heard of anybody having that condition or MMR causing it. Do you see the doublespeak there?

And this 'reasoning' is maintained despite; researchers like Wakefield having documented the condition in hundreds of children, an ever increasing pattern of eye witness accounts describing children suffering from that condition and its onset following MMR, a child being awarded compensation in the US for developing that condition after vaccination, data supporting that vaccination can cause that condition and no other explanation for the rise in incidence in the condition which coincides with increases in the load of the vaccine schedule.

Plus the fact that the original safety tests of the product have been shown to have been unable to detect this particular side effects due to their inadequacy limitations. And the fact that both the post marketing surveillance of the product and the wider system for reporting side effects are known to be flawed.

And the science to back up that reasoning? It comes down to; coincidence, epidemiology (which by its very nature cannot rule out an autism/vaccine link despite having been much touted as having done so) and genetics (which whilst no doubt being a factor cannot alone explain the rise in incidence).

This controversy has been going on for over 20 years now. If it was just coincidence and parent hysteria then it would have died a death by now. The only reason it hasn't, despite sterling work on the part of those who want to defend the MMR at all costs (including children's health, suffering and lives), and having huge sums of money thrown at it by the state, is because parents want justice for their children, they want to prevent the same happening to others, and they have both the truth and the science on their side.

FGS those who deny the existence of vaccine induced autism, denied for years that there even was an increase in autism incidence despite evidence to the contrary. They also tried to deny the dangers of thimerosal for crying out load.

And whilst individual vaccines are tested for safety and some combinations are tested, the vaccine schedule as a whole has never been safety tested. In other words a big assumption is being made that because these individual vaccines seem OK and whilst a coupla combinations seem OK then to give all these vaccines to small children as part of a schedule is OK. And just where is the name of arse is the scientific reasoning behind this? Let's remember that the folk making this assumption are the ones who forgot to add up the total thimerosal load they were exposing children to, and only noticed years after the effect, that they were way over safety limits.

Honestly you couldn't make it up.

Also post was getting a bit long.

Just to be clear, I say 20 years because this story is older than Dr Wakefield's 1998 Lancet paper which brought things into the public eye.

Policywonk if you check out Goldacre's Wikipedia page or the references by John Stone in the BMJ then you will see that it is clearly stated that he is a researcher at the Institute of Psychiatry and that he works at Maudsley Hospital. So not speculation.

One of the things that Mr Stone has pulled Goldacre up about is the award he won for his Guardian article "Never Mind the Facts". In this award winning article Goldacre cites three flawed and heavily criticised studies to make his point. The award he won is funded by GlaxoSmithKline who manufacture, you guessed it, MMR. One of the studies he cites was authored by Eric Fombonne who is, you guessed it, also a member of the Institute of Psychiatry and was an expert witness for MMR manufactuters in the US litigation. There are funding issues with all the studies Goldacre cites, yet he not only fails to declare this but also consistently refuses to answer reasonable questions about why he chooses not to reveal this information.

Additionally the much touted 'Japan' study which should really be called the Honda/Rutter study was co designed and authored by Sir Michael Rutter who is, you guessed it a psychiatrist and member of the Institute of Psychiatry at Maudsley Hospital. He has also acted as an expert witness for MMR manufacturers and is a former chairman of the Welcome Trust which was founded by what used to be the Welcome Foundation and is now Glaxo and which, you guessed it , manufacturers MMR.

Is anybody starting to see a bit of a pattern here?

Beachcomber

You say "Additionally the much touted 'Japan' study which should really be called the Honda/Rutter study was co designed and authored by Sir Michael Rutter who is, you guessed it a psychiatrist and member of the Institute of Psychiatry at Maudsley Hospital."

Why is it surprising that a child psychiatrist renowned for thier epidemiological work should be involved in doing this in connection with autism?
Or that as a result fo his expertise he would be asked to do expert witness work?

If I was designing an epidemiological study looking for autism in children I would have thought he would be the obvious person to be involved.

"however if you're looking at timelines how about the increase in autism since mmr was introduced"

Sorry stuffitllama, but this one is untrue. Incidents of autism began to rise about a decade before the introduction of MMR. (According to DH, a virologist)

Well for what its worth , if the mMR is supposed to affect a very small subset of children within the autistic community what has epidemiology to do with that?

We are talking about kids like mine who have a perfect storm of immune disorder/gut issues/autism.

And given that i think my sons issues are biomedical + gut problems+ neurological I am not sure how a psychiatrist would help him

I dont think it is unsusual for child psychiatrists, and child mental health services to have involvement with children with autism.

DS2 is 12 and has never met one. And if it were suggested I would want to have it explained to me why.

I have a friend who works in a learning disabilities CAMHS team, and autism is a significant part of her job, though I suppose that says nothing about what proportion of children with autism are seem by CAMHS.

One of my kids did Brain Gym stuff under a particularly inspiring headteacher.

The other one didn't do it and isn't half so clever.

But seriously, it was good.

Slug. No -- but doing homework. Will come back to you later.

Very briefly.

There are no official figures on autism twenty years ago, only informed estimates.

The data you are suggesting was arrived at by looking at the ages of people diagnosed with autism. This was on the grounds that MMR was introduced in 1988, and that children were between say, one and two with some catch up vaccinating. That would mean the vast majority of the increase should be in the age group (nowadays) about twenty to twenty two.

However a large part of the numbers diagnosed were in an older age group, thus leading to the circumstantial conclusion that the rise must have begun earlier.

However this ignores the fact that there was a massive vaccination campaign in 1994 in which up to eight million children between the ages of five to sixteen were vaccinated with either MMR or MR, because of scaremongering about a potential measles epidemic (or because a big pharmaceutical had large over-supplies of vaccine which were about to run out of their use-by date -- conspiracy theorists pick your reason!)

So if you were vaccinated in 1994 aged 16, you would now be thirty -- it adds a whole TEN years to the age group which could have regressed into autism following vaccination.

Thus the study is misleading.

Is there any history of 16 year olds developing autistic symptoms after the MMR?

stuffitllama, I was just quoting DH who came home from a conference of virologists with charts and studies. Granted there is the diagnosis bias, autism is far more readily diagnosed these days, but there was a definite sharp upwards swing long before the introduction of MMR.

Why don't you ask him what the rise is based on? They didn't count numbers of people with autism, so they don't have a "base" number. It's not like measles.

27 yes there are reports

I remember reading about how ill Clive LLoyds son was after his MMR at the time but can only google this.
I remember reading that the negative impact on older children tends to be physical rather than neurological but have nothing 'saved' about that as DS2 was only 18 months when he reacted

here