No Autism Link to Common Child Vaccine

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No Autism Link to Common Child Vaccine

No Autism Link to Common Child Vaccine

By Michael Kahn,
Reuters

LONDON (Feb. 4) - A vaccine for measles,
mumps and rubella does not cause autism,
according to the largest study yet showing
there is no evidence linking the childhood
shot to the development disorder.
The study, published on Tuesday in the
Archives of Disease in Childhood, found no
evidence of any abnormal biological response
from the shot that could point to a
link between the vaccine and autism.
“This study really supports the view these
are safe vaccines,” said David Brown, a researcher
at Britain’s Health Protection
Agency who worked on the study. “The evidence
is now so solid there really isn’t a
need for further studies here.”
In 1998, Dr. Andrew Wakefield of Royal
Free Hospital in London and colleagues
sparked a fierce worldwide debate among
scientists and a health scare by suggesting
the MMR jab caused autism. Outbreaks of
all three diseases followed.
Autism is marked by a variety of difficulties
in social interaction and behavior, from the
awkwardness of Asperger syndrome to severely
debilitating repetitive behaviors and
an inability to speak.
The British study looked at nearly 100
autistic children, a group of 52 with learning
difficulties and 90 who were developing
normally.
All the volunteers chosen from a sample of
57,000 children in southern England had
received an MMR vaccination but not
everybody got both doses, said Gillian
Baird, a pediatrician at the Newcomen Centre
for Child Development, who led the
study.
The researchers took blood samples from
the children and found no abnormal immune
response in any of them marked by
higher antibody levels or presence of a
measles virus still left in the body from the
shot, Baird added.
Wakefield, whose research has been widely
discredited, had pointed to these two factors
as a way to explain the link but the latest
findings do not back up that case, Baird
said. Wakefield said in a newspaper interview
last year he believed it was biologically
plausible the shot could cause autism.
“There was no difference across any of the
groups no matter how you cut them up,”
Baird said in a telephone interview. “The
response to the MMR vaccine was the same
in every group.”
Before Wakefield’s study, more than 90
percent of British children received the vaccination,
a figure that dropped to 80 percent
before recovering to a current 85 percent,
according to government figures.
Baird said she hoped the findings, along
with a U.S. study last week showing that a
mercury-based preservative called
thimerosal did not cause autism, would
bolster confidence in the MMR shot.
“It is a big study and we hope people can
have confidence in the MMR shot again,”
Baird said in a telephone interview.
“Measles has come back again because people
have stopped immunizing their children.”

Posted 2/5/08 5:41 PM