Like the Health Secretary Dr John Reid, the government's chief medical officer Sir Liam Donaldson lost no time dancing up and down on the reputation of Andrew Wakefield, the doctor at the centre of the revived MMR furore (see my article today about the current row ). Among many misleadingly complacent comments, Donaldson claimed Wakefield's original Lancet study had never been replicated. But this is not true. As I reported in my series on the controversy in the Daily Mail, there have now been several studies repicating his findings - which were not about MMR, but about a link between bowel disease and autism which had not previously been recognised but is now widely acknowledged. Because of the furore around the one line in that Lancet paper about MMR -- and Wakefield's comments at the related press conference about the vaccine, what he actually discovered has been largely overlooked. So much so, in fact, that the Lancet editor Dr Richard Horton now says the entire Wakefield paper was 'fatally flawed' -- even though in the next breath he says his only quarrel is with the MMR point, while he backs the bowel findings up to the hilt. So how can the whole paper be 'fatally flawed'?

And meanwhile, the CMO is failing to note something else. As the Telegraph reports:

'The latest research comes in an addendum to a paper presented to the American National Institutes of Science earlier this month. It says that a study, submitted for publication, found evidence of measles virus in the spinal fluid of 19 out of 28 children with autism compared with one out of 37 children in a control group. All the children in the study had received the MMR vaccine and none had caught measles naturally.'

So where did this measles virus, which may be implicated in these vaccinated children's brain damage, come from? This does not prove MMR causes autism. Nor does it negate the fact that the vast majority of children have the MMR jab with no adverse consequences. But it does surely raise some extremely urgent questions, which the attempt to destroy Andrew Wakefield only serves to dismiss.

Posted by melanie at February 23, 2004