Autism Speaks Urges Vaccinations

A well-known autism advocacy group, Autism Speaks, is urging parents to vaccinate their children amid a measles outbreak that has already reached 14 states and infected 102 people last month. 

Rob Ring, chief science officer of Autism Speaks, released a statement today stressing that vaccines do not cause autism, and parents should vaccinate.

The Price of Autism-Measles Panic, 15 Years Later

Several news outlets today are reviewing the measles outbreak in Wales, citing public health experts who lay the blame for the burst in cases squarely at the feet of Andrew Wakefield’s bogus MMR vaccine scare in 1998 and the subsequent media coverage. The Wall Street Journal has a particularly in-depth story [hits paywall if you click the link here, but clicking from Google News seems to give full access], “Fifteen Years After Autism Panic, a Plague of Measles Erupts,” that digs into the roles of both in the Wales outbreak, that left 1219 people infected with measles and one in ten hospitalized. Most were hospitalized with pneumonia or dehydration, and most fell into the age range of children who should have been vaccinated around the time of the Wakefield scare.

New Study Suggests Vaccine-Autism Link

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Triplets. Two have autism. One does not. Their father Lou Conte helped put together a new study of people who received payment from the vaccine compensation fund created by the U.S. government.
"What we did is we looked at the people who the government said are clearly vaccine injuries and awarded them compensation," said Conte.
The federal government's vaccine compensation fund helps take care of the medical costs of children who have seizure disorders or brain damage that the families say stems of vaccination. The group that put together this study says the government needs to go one step farther.

Wakefield Fights for Reputation and Theory

As people streamed into Graceview Baptist Church in Tomball, Tex., early one Saturday morning in January, two armed guards stood prominently just inside the doorway of the sanctuary. Their eyes scanned the room and returned with some frequency to a man sitting near the aisle, whom they had been hired to protect.
The man, Andrew Wakefield, dressed in a blazer and jeans and peering through reading glasses, had a mild professorial air. He tapped at a laptop as the room filled with people who came to hear him speak; he looked both industrious and remote. Broad-shouldered and fair at 54, he still has the presence of the person he once was: a conventional winner, the captain of his medical school’s rugby team, the head boy at the private school he attended in England. Wakefield was a high-profile but controversial figure in gastroenterology research at the Royal Free Hospital in London when, in 1998, he upended his career path — and more significant, the best-laid plans of public-health officials — by announcing at a press conference that he had concerns about the safety of the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine (M.M.R.) and its relationship to the onset of autism.

U.K. Panel Makes Right Call

Interesting item from Forbes' health care blog by Dr. Steven Salzberg, Director of the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology and the Horvitz Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park.

It's about time.
It took nearly three years, but the U.K.'s General Medical Council finally issued a ruling about Andrew Wakefield's 1998 study that claimed a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. They ruled that he had acted "dishonestly and irresponsibly" in his research, and further that he didn't have the qualifications to be carrying out some of the experiments on children that he subjected them to.
He also filed for a patent on a "safer" vaccine that he was hoping to sell after he discredited the MMR vaccine. The GMC found all these behaviors amounted to "serious professional misconduct."
What's so awful about Wakefield's behavior is that it has directly contributed to a decline in vaccination rates, first in the U.K. and then in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Huffington Post: The Real Health Care Scare

In all of the white-hot vitriol being spewed over a national health care plan, very little attention is being directed at the pharmaceutical companies and the potential conflicts of interest involving the doctors doing their research. In America, we are generally of the belief that by the time a drug or vaccine has made it into the marketplace there has been enough testing conducted by the FDA and objective physicians and researchers that we can trust its safety. Frequently, we are wrong.
The internecine relationships between drug companies and researchers and their institutions deserve constant scrutiny. As an example, the highest-profile proponent of vaccines like the MMR for children, Dr. Paul Offit has been made a wealthy man by Merck, the pharmaceutical giant that manufactures MMR. Offit did not conduct the research on the MMR (Measles-Mumps-Rubella) vaccine but sold a patent to Merck for a vaccine against rotavirus, which causes diarrhea in children.
Offit is not known to be in the midst of a Merck revenue stream, his opinion can hardly be considered unbiased when speaking about the company's MMR product. None of this is ever disclosed when the media frequently run to interview Offit as a vaccine expert on MMR. In fact, during a recent broadcast on NBC Dateline, "A Dose of Controversy," it was the first time Offit was asked in an interview about the millions he had earned on his rotavirus vaccine royalty. However, no mention was made of Merck by either NBC's Matt Lauer or Offit.

And, click here to read a piece from Reuters on the doctor's failure to disclose this relationship.