Posted on 05/04/2013 5:04:29 PM PDT by rickmichaels
Earlier this month, in the small coastal city of Swansea, Wales, a 25-year-old man with measles was found dead in his flat. It was the first measles fatality in Britain in five years, and a bleak development in an epidemic caused by a health scare that began here more than a decade and a half ago.
Almost 900 people, mostly children and adolescents, have contracted the disease in recent weeks. Health officials say it’s the result of a “lost generation” of children, now roughly 10-18 years old, who did not receive their vaccinations as infants in the 1990s. Back then, there were widely publicized concerns about a link between bowel disease, the MMR vaccine—which protects children against measles, mumps and rubella—and autism. While the link was later disproved and the 1998 paper that promoted it exposed as fraudulent, many parents, particularly in the Swansea area where the local media took up the story, still failed to get their children immunized. Why this legacy of mistrust took hold in south Wales more strongly than the rest of the country is not entirely known, though most put it down to those early reports, combined with a relatively inward-looking culture. What’s certain is that consequences could be dire.
The Swansea epidemic shows no signs of ending; 121 new cases appeared in the last week. Epidemiologists expect the outbreak could last until the summer holidays and beyond. And there are serious concerns it could spread to other parts of Wales, due to low vaccination rates across that region—as well as across the entire country. It is estimated at least 40,000 children across Wales are currently not vaccinated.
The former surgeon and medical researcher at the centre of the controversy is Andrew Wakefield, who was a senior lecturer and honorary consultant in experimental gastroenterology at the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine. In 1998, he published a now-infamous paper in the medical journal The Lancet that linked “behavioural symptoms” with MMR, reporting that the onset of autism began two weeks after infants received their first round of jabs. (His theory was that the measles portion of the vaccine damaged the children’s intestines and eventually their brains.) The paper claimed to have identified a new syndrome, which Wakefield and his co-authors dubbed “autistic enterocolitis”—a behavioural disorder supposedly brought on by MMR and linked to bowel disease.
Many parents of autistic children hailed the research as a breakthrough; not only did it offer a cause for a mysterious and debilitating disorder, it offered a solution, too: a gluten- and dairy-free diet that proponents claimed alleviated symptoms.
Celebrity proponents of the MMR-autism link, most notably Jenny McCarthy, went public promoting the research. But despite 14 major public health studies in countries such as the U.K., U.S., Denmark and Finland, which studied more than 600,000 autistic children, no researchers were able to replicate the link. In fact, the rate of autism was exactly the same in children who had received MMR as those who had not. Wakefield’s theory was obliterated.
The U.K.’s General Medical Council launched an inquiry into allegations of misconduct and, in 2010, found that Wakefield had “failed in his duties as a responsible consultant.” He was struck off the Medical Register and barred from practising medicine. The Lancet, which published the original paper, issued a full and immediate retraction, and the Sunday Times declared Wakefield’s autism link “an elaborate fraud” perpetrated for the personal gain of Andrew Wakefield himself.
Amazingly, none of this has given Wakefield a moment of pause. He has consistently maintained his innocence and the veracity of his findings and continues to promote the idea of an MMR link to autism. Indeed, he took to YouTube earlier this month to defend himself against the latest claims that the outbreak in south Wales was his fault. His bizarre argument is that the government was actually to blame, as it showed more interest in protecting the MMR vaccine than at-risk children and did not heed his advice to administer separate vaccines. The Independent newspaper ran a link to Wakefield’s screed on the front page of its website and was roundly excoriated for giving him a platform.
Meanwhile, as the media focus on Wakefield, public health workers in south Wales are desperately trying to make sure all unvaccinated children receive their jabs. The “lost generation” is still at risk. As one Welsh epidemiologist told the BBC, “Nowhere in Wales is safe from measles, and I think that is true of the U.K. as a whole.” Unrepentant though he is, Andrew Wakefield has a lot to answer for.
More victims of idiots such as Jim Carrey and Jenny McCarthy and their ignorant anti-vaccination activism.
Here is the very latest chart from Children of God for Life outlining all the vaccines with aborted baby tissues: http://www.cogforlife.org/vaccineListOrigFormat.pdf
vaccines make you stupid *and* they are made from dead babies? who knew there is so much evil in this world?
To bad there is not an inoculation to cure stupid.
How in the world did I ever survive?
When I was a kid, during the summer time if any kid came down with measles, mumps, or chickenpox, the mothers had a party to get all the kids together so we would ALL catch it. That way we’d be sick during the summer instead of missing school.
Yeah. I was there.
The only one I missed was the tonsils party. They’d have five or six kids all go in at the same time to have their tonsils removed. They’d come back with stories about all the ice cream you wanted and other crazy stuff. Doctor said I was too skinny and he didn’t want to operate on me.
Had all the other stuff, still have the tonsils.
Natural selection one generation removed.
bump for later
Well it’s all fun and games until someone puts their eye out. /s
FWIW, my older brother nearly died from complications after getting the Mumps when he was 12 years old - meningitis. The doctors thought he wouldn’t live and if he did he would be severely brain damaged, the priest was called and my brother was given last rites. He did live and eventually recovered fully, but that was after spending nearly two months in the hospital and slowly learning how to speak, walk and feed himself again. I have photos of my brother holding me as an infant shortly before he got sick and photos of my brother right after he came home from the hospital – he didn’t look like the same person. My parents made sure that I got all my vaccinations; they never wanted me to go through what my brother went through.
And FWIW, while back when in the day, many kids got the measles, mumps and the chicken pox and recovered with no lasting side effects, but the mumps can cause lifelong irreversible sterility in males, the measles can kill (I knew a kid who got the measles and nearly died from the high fever, she only lived because she was plunged into an ice bath and missed two months of school) and the measles can cause serious birth defects if a pregnant woman is exposed to it, even if she has been vaccinated, and people who were purposely exposed to the chicken pox as children by their well meaning but ignorant parents, can one day thank their probably now long deceased parents for doing them that great summertime favor while they suffer from an excruciatingly painful and debilitating case of the shingles.
Given a choice between sterility and ovarian cancer. I might pick plain old sterility.
Most scientific papers, when they are retracted, are deleted. Someone looking for the paper would find only the citation, along with a notice “This article has been retracted.”
Not so with the Wakefield paper. It is there for anyone to read, and I have done so. It is such abysmally bad science that it should never have been published; I have no idea why a prestigious journal like The Lancet accepted it.
All kinds of improprieties have been revealed since that horrid paper was published. Wakefield was partnered with a lawyer; together they hoped to rake in money through lawsuits, using Wakefield’s paper as scientific “evidence” to support their planned gold digging. Furthermore, besides the dubious scientific quality of this study, it turns out that Wakefield performed medium to high risk procedures on his pediatric study subjects without bothering to seek IRB (ethics review) approval prior to the study. It is unlikely an IRB would have approved of such procedures. He also falsified (fabricated) data.
Wakefield has lost his medical license because of his gross misconduct. Given the number of children who have died as a direct result of his scam, that punitive measure barely even qualifies as a slap on the wrist. He deserves a punishment more in line with the loss of life that he caused.
Back then, the idea was to make sure everyone had this stuff by the second grade. And I am sure there is a risk. But out of all the kids I grew up with, we must of been an awfully lucky bunch.
And since I've had a healthy, happy, successful life at a much higher than average income level, I'll be happy to keep my ‘well meaning but ignorant parents.’ When I see a generation raise kids even half as well as they did, I might consider jealousy.
Not only can measles cause birth defects, it can kill a fetus, because the immune system doesn't develop until *after* birth. Rubella (which the "R" component of the MMR vaccine protects against) is even worse for the unborn.
The older a boy is when he develops mumps, the more likely he is to become sterile.
Shingles is not only painful when the rash is present, but it can remain painful for years after, a condition known as "post-herpetic neuralgia." Depending on the health of the person who gets shingles, the disease can be debilitating, and even fatal. If the virus affects the auditory nerve, the patient can go deaf; likewise, blindness can result if the virus affects the optic nerve. About one out of every three people who have had chicken pox will develop shingles; having shingles once does not protect against having it again. Shingles is caused by the chicken pox virus. No one ever recovers from chicken pox; it just goes dormant in the nerves.
Truth: The saved generation!
The only hope of living a long healthy life is having the childhood diseases in early childhood.
” No one ever recovers from chicken pox; it just goes dormant in the nerves.”
This goes for chickenpox vaccines as well. Those are ‘live virus’ vaccines. One way or another you are infected with chickenpox.
And, happily, both the chickenpox and shingles vaccine are grown in vats of cells derived from an abortion older than I am.
And, being unable to completely filter the fetal DNA from the vaccine itself, the manufacturers are allowed to protect the exact amounts of fetal dna much the same way Coke protects the recipe for their soft drinks.
Creepy.
Everything about vaccines, and their promotors is beyond creepy.
If further studies confirm that association (the one discussed at your link), it means that some ovarian cancers could potentially be prevented by a vaccine that induces anti-MUC1 antibodies. Such a vaccine would be fairly straightforward to design, and the clinical trials would take a few years.
A quick perusal of PubMed reveals that various vaccines are being researched for the treatment of ovarian cancer. The MUC1 protein, in the aberrant form made by tumors, is a target of therapies currently under development.
It might be cheaper to just let little girls get mumps. Have mumps parties for 5 year olds. Of both sexes.
It worked for evolutionary purposes so far.
My Johns Hopkins educated ped refused to give me the mumps vaccine when it became available in the late 60’s. Said it was a waste of money, especially for girls. Until it became mandatory he only gave it to boys who hadn’t had documented mumps by age 9.
3 million kids born in the country every year. Roughly. 1.5m of those are girls. 1.5million X (hypothetical)$75 vaccine. With booster shots every 5 to 10 years. Like most other vaccines.
Do the math and see if you can tell me which big government/medical will pick.
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