More research disproves vaccine-autism link

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This article was published 09/03/2019 (2717 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The notion that vaccines might cause autism was refuted nine years ago, when a British medical panel concluded in 2010 that Andrew Wakefield, the doctor with undisclosed financial interests in making such claims, had acted with “callous disregard” in conducting his research.

But in 2019, professional epidemiologists are still devoting time and resources to discrediting Wakefield’s work, which set off a steep decline in vaccinations, including in the United States, where Wakefield moved in 2004.

An increasing number of parents are exempting their children from immunization for religious, personal and medical reasons, in a trend that public health experts warn is threatening to reverse the progress that allowed officials to declare measles eliminated in the U.S. in 2000. In January and February of this year, 206 individual cases were confirmed in 11 states — more than the number of cases in all of 2017.

The latest evidence unequivocally denying any link between autism and the vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella — a two-dose course that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says is 97 per cent effective — came Monday in a paper published in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Researchers at Copenhagen’s Statens Serum Institut examined data for Danish children born from 1999 through the end of 2010, more than half a million people all together. The epidemiologists and statisticians then used population registries to link information on vaccination status to autism diagnoses, as well as to sibling history of autism and other risk factors.

The findings show that the vaccine does not increase the risk of autism, lending new statistical certainty to what was already medical consensus. The researchers further concluded that vaccination is not likely to trigger the developmental disorder in susceptible populations and is not associated with a clustering of cases appearing after immunization.

“The appropriate interpretation is that there’s no association whatsoever,” Saad Omer, a professor of global health, epidemiology and pediatrics at Emory University, said in an interview with the Washington Post.

In an editorial accompanying the study, however, Omer and a colleague asked whether vaccine research was best conducted as a “response to the conspiracy du jour.”

Limited resources, they said, might be better spent on promising leads in autism research than on continuing to engage with “vaccine skeptics.”

Omer nevertheless hailed the Danish paper as “the largest, or one of the largest, studies on the subject.” Its only limitation, he said, was one basic to all observation studies, that “you can’t intentionally vaccinate people or prevent them from vaccinating to study the effects, which would be unethical.”

The results did come at a critical juncture. Six outbreaks are currently ongoing in the U.S., according to the CDC. The virus has similarly been spreading globally. An unvaccinated French five-year-old recently reintroduced the disease to Costa Rica, which had been free of measles for five years. An outbreak in an Orthodox Jewish community in New York began when an unvaccinated child returned home after acquiring the disease in Israel, where a major flare-up is occurring.

The World Health Organization reported 72 deaths from measles in Europe last year. In 2015, a woman in Washington state died of pneumonia after contracting measles. It was the first U.S. death from the disease since 2003.

Measles is highly contagious, remaining for as long as two hours in the air of a room where an infected person has been. While the illness often begins with cold-like symptoms and a rash, infected people may fall victim to additional complications, including pneumonia and, in more severe cases, inflammation of the brain known as encephalitis and even seizures.

— Washington Post