bit unfair to suggest that wakefield is encouraging people to spend money-- when the original paper was published single vacccine was available on the nhs. before publication he had tried to talk to the dept of health about his concerns - he had meetinga- and no-one listened. at the time he didn't know how many children were involved. the figure of 7% was is recent. i get the impression that he went public because he couldn't get anyone to take his concerns seriously- and he was so worried by what he saw that he wouldn't have been able to sleep at night if he thought this was continuing to happen to children regularly. the children he saw were severely autistic and i suspect some of his response was an emotional one at having suddenly become involved with families of autistic children. there is something about a severely autistic child that fires some people (just something i've noticed in people's responses to ds1- and towards us). It certainly was not something that was sensible but at the time i think he truly thought lots of children were being damaged and he understood what that meant for the children and their families. i have no idea whether he would have done the same thing had he known that small numbers were being affected-or whether he would have thought they were acceptrable collateral damage for the good of the vaccination programme.
BTW the original lancet paper goes out of its way to say that the presence of measles virus does not establish causality- and O leary- who hasdone a lot of recent work continually says the same (loudly- politically I suspect that's sensible).
Why do you think that giving jabs singly is more dangerous? They're the same strains same everything as in the MMR. The only danger comes from being unprotected for longer but the goovt has made that worse by interfering with the import of mumps vaccine. Of course people are forced to use unregulated clinics- but if the govt didn't try to bully people into having th MMR then that wouldn't arise.
Of course I accept Nick Chadwick didn;t find measles virus in the samples. But I have done enough molecular Biology myself (spent a year hovering over a PCR machine) to know how difficult it can be wworking with tiny bits of material. I'm not sure how contamination could have occured so I'm inclined to believe the results for Wakefield et al. I also worked in a lab next to a bunch of peolpe working on ancient DNA and their poor PhD students had major problems amplifying DNA.
TBH at this stage I think it doesn't really matter whether Wakefiled is right or not. There's enough work out there that shows it may be a problem in a small number of children. More work should therefore be carried out and single vaccines used (and looked at themselves obviously!) until the question is answered. That's all wakefield said. Now it may be that the dept of health thinks that the numbers involved (something like 3 or 4 kids per 15000) is acceptable collateral damage. Fine. In which case they should be honest enough to say that publically and compensate those who are damaged.
I was given an immunisatin leaflet by my HV on Friday (she saiid she had to). On its way to the bin I was delighted to read how safe thimerosil is. (Mercury is so safe my friend John Krebs is telling pregnant women not to eat tuna- but the dept of health thinks its fine to inject into an 8 week old baby- yeah right).
Socci- I know very little about the make up of antiD. Although I've had it several times (never had it during pregnancy though- only after birth). I suppose like anything it depends how much you really need it. If you were showing antibodies during pregnancy II guess you need it and need to take the risk (although would be worth seeing if a thimerosil free version was available)