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The Lancet retracts study linking vaccine to autism

'The damage has been done': expert

By: Helen Branswell

Posted: 02/3/2010 1:00 AM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

ALEX BRANDON / THE ASSOCIATED PRESS ARCHIVES Enlarge Image

Vaccine refusal rates were highest in Britain following publication of the study.

TORONTO -- A top British medical journal has retracted a discredited study that linked the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine to autism and fuelled anti-vaccination sentiments in Europe and North America.

The Lancet, which published the controversial paper by Dr. Andrew Wakefield and colleagues in 1998, said Tuesday it had become clear following a review of Wakefield's conduct by Britain's General Medical Council that several elements of the study were false.

Last week the council ruled that Wakefield had shown a "callous disregard" for the children used in his study and acted unethically.

The Lancet's move, viewed as long overdue by many infectious disease experts, was welcomed as a way of clearing discredited data from the scientific record.

But the legacy of the publication remains, several said upon hearing about the journal's announcement.

"It was out there for a very long time. So it's good The Lancet has retracted it. It helps in a small way. But the truth of the matter is the damage has been done," said Dr. Allison McGeer, an infectious diseases expert at Toronto's Mount Sinai Hospital.

"The MMR-autism argument is not about the Wakefield article (anymore). It's about the accumulation of belief and perception that's happened since the Wakefield article."

"So ... will it change the landscape of what's going on now? Not at all."

Subsequent studies found no proof the vaccine is connected to autism. And 10 of the 13 authors later repudiated the work in a statement published by The Lancet.

Wakefield and the two authors who did not renounce the study face being stripped of their right to practise medicine in Britain when the General Medical Council hands down its sanction.

The concern raised by the study has had an enormous effect. Worried British parents abandoned the so-called MMR vaccine in droves. And with tens of thousands of unvaccinated children, Britain saw resurgences in childhood diseases that had been largely vanquished up to that point.

While vaccine refusal rates were highest in Britain following the publication, the concerns spread to Europe, North America and beyond. And the diseases spread, too.

A large mumps outbreak that started in the Maritimes in 2007 was set off by a virus imported from the United Kingdom, said Dr. Noni MacDonald, an infectious diseases expert at Dalhousie University in Halifax. More than 1,000 cases were recorded over a period of months as that outbreak spread across the country.

-- The Canadian Press, with files from The Associated Press

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition February 3, 2010 B5

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