ALTHOUGH SEVERAL studies confirm that there is currently no basis to associate the measles, mumps, rubella (MMR) vaccine with the development of the severe childhood disease, autism, the controversy continues. Perhaps, because there are also studies making an association.
However, Dr. David Salisbury, visiting principal medical officer, United Kingdom's Department of Health, was at pains, during the public session of the Paediatric Association of Jamaica's (PAJ's) conference last weekend, to cite a battery of European and American studies which have all come to the same conclusion there is no evidence of a causal link between the vaccine and autism.
He stood his ground, even when challenged by a member of the public, who pointed to the possible toxic effect, not of the vaccine itself, but of the preservative used in the vaccine.
"Autism is often noticed just after children have had their MMR vaccine, it is a critical stage in the development of children when their language skills are advancing rapidly and here you start to detect the problem in the second year after birth, and regression, the loss of skills, is not a new finding," Dr. Salisbury said.
Regression in children, that is, loss of skills, he said was reported way back in 1947, 30 years before the introduction of the MMR vaccine, in the very first paper on autism, where it was noted that 25 per cent of children with autism suffered this regression.
Autism, a rare and severe psychiatric disorder of childhood, with an onset before age two-and-a-half, has been increasing over the last 20 years, Dr. Salisbury believes that the number of cases hasn't truly increased, only the detection and awareness of the condition.
How did this controversy start? Dr. Salisbury who is also honorary senior lecturer in child health at Kings College, London, tried to trace the path:
It got started when the measles virus was thought to be present in the bowel tissues of people with inflammatory bowel disease particularly Crohn's disease
then it was said that if you caught measles when you were particularly young, or if your mother caught measles in late pregnancy, then that was a risk factor also for Crohn's disease
the next twist in the story was that measles vaccine, not MMR, was said to be a risk factor for Crohn's disease
then the next twist was to suggest, in just one study done in Iceland, that if young children caught measles and mumps in the same year, it increases the risk of them getting Crohn's disease later on.
"Every one of these theories cannot be confirmed and have been shown to be wrong when people tried to replicate the findings, and even the people who said they could find measles virus in the bowel of people with inflammtory bowel disease, later when they did more sensitive tests could not find the same results," Dr. Salisbury stressed.
How did the controversy make the link to autism? Cases of autism have been increasing and as mentioned before autism is often noticed just after children have had their MMR vaccine. The next step in the argument against the MMR vaccine says, that there is a new syndrome of regressive autism after MMR vaccine is administered, but, Dr. Salisbury says that this regression was identified in the early days, when autism was first identified as a condition.
The final twist in the argument according to Dr. Salisbury is when people will say that if it is not MMR then what is it. It is a search for answers, which he says is quite understandable.
