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MMR - The Warnings Ignored

by MELANIE PHILLIPS, Daily Mail

For three months, Mail writer Melanie Phillips has been investigating the MMR controversy.

Yesterday, in the first part of a major series, she revealed how crucial evidence has been distorted to give the vaccine the all-clear and how supposedly neutral experts are linked to drug firms producing it.

She also disclosed new research suggesting MMR's critics may have been right all along.

Today, she looks at the warnings that have gone unheeded.

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Little William Kessick was a bubbly and jolly baby. Bright as a button, he was born without problems 14 years ago and passed all the normal milestones of child development with flying colours. Then, at 15 months, he had his MMR jab - a triple vaccination for mumps, measles and rubella. Within a few weeks, his mother Rosemary says she watched her child start to disintegrate.

'He had started to use a few words, like ball and book. Suddenly I realised he wasn't saying these words properly any more. Then his language just faded away.

'The last word he had was juice; and then that went too. He started banging his head against the walls and the furniture. He stopped responding to the spoken word.'

Mrs Kessick noticed that although William was eating normally, he was terribly thin, with his ribs poking through. He had appalling diarrhoea all the time, and was screaming all day and all night.

'The doctors just dismissed it. I put it together with the MMR which seemed to be the only thing that had happened, but they wouldn't listen. I was told I was being a bit neurotic about his behaviour.'

As William got worse and worse, Mrs Kessick found one small ray of hope. Changes to her son's diet seemed to make a difference to his behaviour.

By trial and error, she discovered what other researchers have subsequently confirmed - that if such children avoid foods containing gluten and casein (derived from wheat and milk) not only their gut problems but also their behavioural difficulties dramatically improve.

The two sets of symptoms seemed inextricably linked. And Mrs Kessick was sure that MMR had somehow triggered them both.

She went from doctor to doctor but no one would listen. In desperation, she contacted a vaccination pressure group called Jabs, founded by Cheshire mother Jackie Fletcher after her own son, Robert, developed epilepsy and brain damage following MMR.

Robert, now 11, has the development of a 14-month- old baby. Doctors told his mother that that the MMR jab had 'revealed' Robert's epilepsy, not caused it.

Jackie Fletcher told Mrs Kessick that she knew of only one doctor who would take her fears seriously: Andrew Wakefield, who worked at the Royal Free Hospital in London, and was one of the first doctors to sound the alarm over MMR.

But WAS Mrs Kessick right to blame the vaccination for her son's catastrophic decline? And how could gut trouble be linked to problems with behaviour and the brain?

Are Wakefield and his fellow researchers scaremongers, or pioneers ranged against a hidebound establishment? Have they made an important discovery - or are they wrenching the facts to fit a theory that doesn't hold water?

To get to the truth, as this special Mail series is trying to do, we must look more closely at the medical arguments. As we are about to see, it is a story of warnings that have gone ignored and experts who have been savaged for failing to support official line. Yet however often the evidence against MMR has been dismissed by the medical establishment, the dissident researchers have come back with new and troubling questions.

Andrew Wakefield made his name researching inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). He had a theory that measles virus - which tends to home in on gut tissue - might damage blood vessels, causing the wall of the bowel to break down

and infection to set in.

His early work was aimed at proving a causal link between measles and Crohn's disease, a chronic bowel disorder. He failed to do so.

His critics cite this as evidence that his whole case is flawed, but other researchers have confirmed a high incidence of measles in the gut of children with Crohn's.

In any event, Wakefield still had measles in his sights. He had noticed a huge increase in IBD among children. Since the gut was important to the body's immune responses, there was probably something to which these children's immune system was reacting.

Might it be the measles virus, or even the attenuated form of the virus in measles vaccine? Wakefield's concern deepened when he found that exposure to both measles and mumps in the same year appeared significantly to increase the risk of IBD.

The MMR vaccine, introduced in 1989, was for measles, mumps and rubella. In other words, it gave children simultaneous exposure to the two key viruses.

Wakefield became so anxious that he wrote to Dr David Salisbury, the Government's principal medical officer for communicable diseases and immunisation, drawing attention to numerous studies indicating an association between bowel disease in children and measles. He received no reply.

A year later, when he heard of the proposed re-vaccination in 1994 of more than seven million children to counter a suggested measles epidemic, he wrote again urging that the campaign be aborted while more research was carried out.

He was ignored again and the campaign went ahead. Meanwhile, more and more parents were becoming convinced that the MMR jab had produced a catastrophic reaction in their children.

Rosemary Kessick was one of them - and her relief when she contacted Wakefield was immense. Besides being prepared to consider a connection between the measles vaccine and her son William's bowel symptoms, he was also prepared to listen when she suggested that it was linked with William's behavioural problems.

'I phoned him and said I thought the gut has affected the brain - and bless him, he didn't put the phone down on me,' recalls Mrs Kessick.

William was examined by the Royal Free team including the renowned paediatric gastroenterologist, Professor John Walker-Smith.

They found an impacted bowel, diarrhoea and inflammation. After the examination, said Mrs Kessick, Walker-Smith came into the room and said: 'You are right; we think this is a new disease state.'

Once they started treating William's bowel symptoms, there was a dramatic transformation in his behaviour. He began to laugh again and use words for the first time in years. To Mrs Kessick, it was now undeniable that the two sets of symptoms were linked. She then consulted Norfolk solicitor Richard Barr, who was preparing law suits on behalf of hundreds of other parents who claimed their children had been damaged by MMR.

Follow the links below to continue Melanie's investigation.

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The Case For And Against The MMR Vaccine

by MICHAEL HANLON, Daily Mail

The MMR vaccine was introduced in October 1988 to provide a one-shot immunisation against three diseases - measles, mumps and rubella.

Since its widespread introduction, recommended by the World Health Organisation, rates of these diseases have fallen close to zero in immunised western populations.

FOR

Two doses of MMR gives 99 per cent protection against measles - the most serious of the diseases immunised against.

Most doctors believe giving the three vaccines at once is a good idea.

If given one at a time (three single vaccines followed by a booster for each), they have to be carefully spaced out.

The fear is that many parents would fail to complete the course. Children could also be vulnerable to infection between inoculations.

If more than 15 per cent of the population fail to vaccinate their children, measles epidemics could return to the UK.

Government-commissioned study (published in the Lancet in 1999) investigated claims that MMR was linked to autism and bowel disease. It concluded there was no link. Another study commissioned by the Department of Health and published in January this year also gave MMR the all-clear.

The scientific establishment remains convinced that MMR is the safest option. Professor Peter Lachman, President of the Academy of Medical Sciences, said: 'Even if there are dangers, all the evidence suggests that the chances of something nasty happening to you as a result of not getting vaccinated are around 100 times greater than something nasty happening to you if you do.'

AGAINST

Parents first voiced concerns over links between MMR and autism and the bowel condition Crohn's disease in the mid-1990s.

There were several cases of healthy children developing these conditions after being given the vaccine.

Increasing numbers of parents decided not to have their children vaccinated with the triple vaccine. They were supported by a handful of doctors happy to administer the vaccines in single doses.

Dr Andrew Wakefield, a consultant gastroenterologist, drew national attention to a possible link between the illnesses and the MMR method of vaccination in a study in 1998.

Dr Wakefield resigned from his post at the Royal Free and University College Medical School in North London earlier this month after being told his research did not 'fit in' with the college's strategy.

Dr Wakefield claims combining three live viruses in one injection could be dangerous.

He has speculated that the MMR vaccine damages the bowel, releasing toxins that travel to the brain and trigger autism.

He recommends children are vaccinated against mumps, measles and rubella one at a time.

Paul Shattock, of the Autism Research Unit in Sheffield, who is carrying out a large- scale study of 5,000 autistic children in Britain, supports Dr Wake-field's findings.

There is growing interest in his work in Canada and the U.S. Where similar concerns about MMR have been raised.

Statistics on autism seem to back up the suspicions of those opposed to the MMR vaccine.

Some research suggests a ten-fold rise in cases in the past ten years.

This corresponds to the introduction of MMR.

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Dispelling MMR Rumours

In 1998 The Lancet, the UK medical journal, printed a research paper by Dr AJ Wakefield which suggested a connection between the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism.

Although Dr Wakefield's paper was dismissed as unsubstantiated by organisations such as the Medical Research Council, sections of the press seized on the findings. A scare ensued with parents boycotting the jab.

The apparent link was made public despite Dr Wakefield stating: "We did not prove an association between measles, mumps and rubella vaccine and the syndrome described."

Members of the media have since admitted it was one of the biggest injustices against public health, regretting the scale of the scare and the problems it could potentially cause.

The scare was further exacerbated by the fact autism is a development disorder which typically appears in the second year of life, coinciding with the time the MMR is administered.

In some cases, signs of autism may develop soon after the vaccine and wrongly lead parents to believe the events are connected.

No conclusive evidence has been found linking MMR and the condition but there are numerous studies disproving any connection, including papers by Gillberg and Heijbel (1998) and Taylor (1999) which have received far less publicity.

The result is the uptake of the MMR jab remains below the level needed for the vaccination programme to be effective in generating herd immunity.

This is where the disease can no longer be passed on in a community and helps prevent epidemics. It stands at only 82 per cent nationally, when it should be 95 per cent.

Lewisham's immunisation co-ordinator Michael Corr says in some areas the uptake is alarmingly low.

In Lewisham it is just 64.1 per cent and there are other areas where uptake is less than 50 per cent.

He warns: "Measles is not a trivial disease. An unimmunised boy of 13 died recently, the first fatality from the disease in 14 years."

Michael's post was introduced to educate and support both the community's health professionals and patients about immunisation.

He added: "Immunising children against potentially life-threatening disease needs to become normal again. It is the most successful and effective measure we have.

"The MMR scare is still prevalent and until the background awareness of the threat of disease is raised, some parents will feel, mistakenly, the threat from the vaccine is higher than the threat of disease."

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