Childhood Vaccinations – Necessary or Overkill?

Here's a link to the original Wakefield paper which started the whole MMR and autism scare.http://www.freenetpages.co.uk/.../Wakefield%20Feb%201998.pdfAny practicing scientists out there will, I'm sure, be as horrified as I was that the Lancet published this. The work is of exceptionally poor quality and the Lancet has, in fact, apologised for publishing it in the first place.To get an overview of the entire fiasco see hereAndrew Wakefield: a cheat exposedNo one has ever denied that vaccines can have side effects, in fact vaccination is intended to give you a mild form of the disease in order to "show" your immune system what the invader looks like. Next time round the immune system can zap it before it can get a grip on you (this applies to live, attenuated vaccines).What is not in question is that the side effects of any given vaccine have to be milder than the disease itself. So for typhoid it's acceptable to feel pretty rough for a few days, not so for flu vaccination.Although rubella is a mild disease in itself, we all know what it does in the first trimester of pregnancy. It isn't true that vaccinated children lose their immunity by the time they're adults. In the UK pregnant women are screened for rubella immunity at the start of their pregnancy. The vast majority are immune. The whole point of vaccinating children is to raise the herd immunityto the disease. This means that an unvaccinated pregnant woman has less chance of coming into contact with the disease.The same herd immunity is used when vaccinating for whooping cough, measles diphtheria etc. There are some children with malfunctioning immune systems and also ALL newborns who cannot be immunised and can't risk being exposed to these diseases since they would probably be killed by them.I'm all for vaccination if it helps to protect the most vulnerable in the community from dying of some of these diseases and it prevents my child from the horrible effects of whooping cough, diphtheria, tetanus, polio, measles, mumps etc. The risks from vaccination are very low, the risks from the diseases is very high.

just a bump..... took me ages to find this. Maybe I should put my specs on when reading.

I've posted my initial post to LindLou here

I couldn't let this pass. You said Do you also agree that many more children are keeping hampsters as pets as the rate of autism has increased? Should this prompt some questions?This is exactly what Andrew Wakefield did in his study which claimed that the MMR caused autism. He studied a grand total of 12 children who were selected on the basis of having autism, what he called "autistic bowel disorder" or both and then asked the question "How many of these children were given the MMR?"Given that the MMR uptake rate was pretty high at the time, the answer was pretty high, 11 out of the 12 I think. On the basis of this AND THIS ALONE, he announced that MMR caused autism and vaccination rates still have not recovered.All his co-authors on the paper have retracted their claims, subsequent studies have totally refuted his claims, the journal which published the original paper did so only to show how NOT to do research and explained this in their editorial of that issue. Unfortunately that wasn't reported. The media missed the point completely and the journal has said they should never have published in the first place.Meanwhile, there are still poeple who use outdated source material and claim to be informed. You can't use source material from the nineties and expect to be up to date or well-informed, I also note that many of your antivaccination sources are from the 1960s and before. Thy're worse than useless - they're dangerous and to trust you child's health to outdated opinions WHICH HAVE SUBSEQUENTLY BEEN SHOWN TO BE WRONG is misguided at best.A suggestion for you is to look at all the evidence. Don't just look at the evidence which you think supports your point of view. The reasons all the sources you have given are so old is because those sources which refute you are the more recent ones and they are pro-vaccine. Any anti-vaccine evidence of more recent date can only be found at crank websites, expounded by people who don't understand what they're talking about, but who know a few buzzwords which impress the even worse informed.I'll try to dig out more info on the Andrew Wakefield paper. I have it on .pdf on the hard drive of a dead computer and don't think I can access it. Can I say that after having read his paper I was appalled at the total lack of thinking, critical or otherwise, which went into that paper. I'm a research scientist myself. If I produced research of that quality, I would fully expect and deserve to be fired and blackballed.Edited by Trixie, : No reason given.