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The Lancet Recants Study Linking Autism To Vaccine
JamJam writes "The Lancet, a major British medical journal, has retracted a flawed study linking the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine to autism and bowel disease. British surgeon and medical researcher Andrew Wakefield and his colleagues originally released their study in 1998. Since then 10 of Wakefield's 13 co-authors have renounced the study's conclusions and The Lancet has said it should never have published the research. Wakefield now faces being stripped of his right to practice medicine in Britain. The vaccine-autism debate should now end."
Wasn't it peer reviewed?
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Yeah, right. Since when have facts ever got in the way of a 'good' conspiracy theory?
Can someone outline the flaws in the study? I know we here at /. are experts at things like that. But I also don't want to RTFA.
So why exactly should I not believe the original study? From where I stand (which is little to zero knowledge on the subject) I could conclude that each of the co authors one by one were persuaded by the various pharmaceutical companies which standed to be harmed by this research.
Here's the actual retraction, rather than reporting on reporting on the retraction:
The Lancet, Early Online Publication, 2 February 2010
doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(10)60175-7
Retraction—Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children
The Editors of The Lancet
Following the judgment of the UK General Medical Council's Fitness to Practise Panel on Jan 28, 2010, it has become clear that several elements of the 1998 paper by Wakefield et al(1) are incorrect, contrary to the findings of an earlier investigation.(2) In particular, the claims in the original paper that children were "consecutively referred" and that investigations were "approved" by the local ethics committee have been proven to be false. Therefore we fully retract this paper from the published record.
References
1 Wakefield AJ, Murch SH, Anthony A, et al. Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children. Lancet 1998; 351: 637-641
2 Hodgson H. A statement by The Royal Free and University College Medical School and The Royal Free Hampstead NHS Trust. Lancet 2004; 363: 824.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
They can just advertise that he lost his licence because the powers that be want to supress information and they are doing it by silencing this guy. So spend $29.95 a month to sign up for our web site and learn what the man doesn't want you to know. (You know it'll work out just like that.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
The problem is exactly what is written above, although not in the way the author thinks.
Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
I think the fact that no other researchers have managed to get anything like the results Wakefield did should be influential in forming opinions about this.
There is more anecdotal evidence to prove vaccines don't cause autism, so wouldn't that push the debate into being over, if anecdotal evidence is the measuring bar?
Herd immunity issues aside, I'm all for the stupid reducing their evolutionary fitness. Natural selection and all that.
After reading TFA, as far as my medically ignorant mind makes out, the study was withdrawn due to ethical issues obtaining the samples for the study, not due to issues with the conclusions drawn. I can see how this would lead Wakefield to be deregistered due to ethical considerations however how does this disprove his conclusions? The logic seems to go "your study shows there may be a link between autism and vaccines, you obtained samples unethically, therefore this proves once and for all and hereby ends the discussion that there is conclusively no link between autism and vaccines". I always pay extra close attention when a scientific discussion starts descending into claims of absolutes, a statement like "the possibility is laughably remote that there is a link between x and y" makes sense, "there is no link between x and y and nobody is to suggest there is" smacks of dark ages medicine rather than science.
I would love someone more medically inclined to provide more background as I sense a lot of info was missing from the story / article.
Click on Dr. Wilson's link to see his copy of a graph showing the slight drop in MMR vaccinations resulting in a sharp increase in measles cases. Fortunately, a mere thousand or so more per year will only mean a couple of deaths, blindings, sterilizations, and so forth. Words fail me.
Not enough anecdotal evidence to make a conclusion?
Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
Just because one side of the debate has used bad data and judgment doesn't mean there is no merit to the debate.
It does when the only reason the debate ever started was because of that bad data.
You're absolutely correct: the retraction doesn't prove anything. However, decades of attempts to reproduce the study, none of them reaching the same conclusion, does prove an error in the initial study. It turn out that the act of publishing doesn't actually have an effect on the underlying science, while the repeatability does.
It's amazing what results you can get if you keep repeating the experiment until you get the results you want.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
suck it, Jenny McCarthy & Oprah!
No, autism *diagnosis* is on the rise. It is a subtle but important difference.
Oh, and it's "Autism Spectrum Disorder" now, which includes everything from very slight Aspergers to the very profoundly autistic. This is a good measure of the increase, if not most of it.
Is there a link between vaccines and autism? I don't know. I don't believe for a moment that the debate is over. There's way too much anecdotal evidence, even if there is no merit.
What does that even mean? "There's too much anecdotal evidence, even if there is no merit"? So, like, we both know that anecdotal evidence is crap, and the science all says otherwise, but because there's "too much" spouting off of post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacies, it has to mean something? Yeah, it means most people are incapable of making good observations, have no understanding of statistics, and are more than happy to let confirmation bias run wild.
Also, anecdotally, none of these geniuses I've ever seen discuss the issue have any understanding of history, and of the suffering the human race endured before vaccination existed. Whatever tiny increase in autism they think actually exists, even if it turned out against all reason and evidence to be true, wouldn't be worth going back to that.
I swear, if there's ever an outbreak of smallpox, and these retarded fuckers refuse to get vaccinated, I'm going to start taking them out for the good of humanity.
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I believe it's due to what you wrote.
You've stated something as fact, and it is based on your perception. It's an example, and it may be valid, or it may be exaggerated, or it could be totally wrong... But to you, it's fact. You believe that the H1N1 vaccine gives people the swing flu... At the very least you imply that it does, and your proof is in your anecdote. If you have hard numbers to show us that people will get the swine flu from the vaccine (or at least that they have a higher incidence rate), then please provide them.
I'm guilty of this too on occasion.. I'm trying to be better about it.
...I for one am waiting to see what Jenny McCarthy has to say about this.
or else!
The problem is that most people don't understand statistics, numerical significance or even the scientific method. This leads the unwashed masses to jump to conclusions that are based on anecdotal evidence, un-normalised data comparisons and non-causal correlations which sound quite reasonable on the surface.
When a study is properly performed and analysed to remove various biases and incorrect assumptions, it usually involves counter-intuitive statistical analyses.
Unfortunately, due to a lack of understanding of the scientific method, and despite the fact that a denouncement has been widely reported, many people will still be given media time to promote their ignorant contrarian claims.
When discussing high profile scientific studies like this one, I keep hearing people argue with reasoning like 'well that is just another point of view'. I intentionally used the word 'claims' and not 'view point' in the above paragraph. A view point implies that a contradictory, but valid alternative explanation exists. In the case of scientific study, a falsifiable hypothesis can be shown to be true or false. If it is deemed false it may still be correct in some of it's underlying elements. In that case it would be revised and a more accurate hypothesis developed.
Some people seem to think that if they personally don't understand the complex reasoning process behind a peer reviewed scientific conclusion, then they should feel free to jump to their own. Because of this, many kids have not been immunised over the last ten years, and now we are seeing the fall out of what happens when too many people decide against the recommendations of the medical establishment.
these people are putting other peoples kids and the population as a whole in great danager due to dropping vacination rates, which completely contridicts your point that autism rates climbing is some how linked - after all if less people are vaccinating how can autism be increasing if it's the cause?
we are lowering whats called herd immunity. at the moment the rest of the herd is still largely immune to things like polio and mumps, this keeps those who aren't immune safe because no one around them generally has the virus. once this drops to a critical number (which is VERY close to happening, and has already happened with hooping cough) large numbers of kids are going to start being killed or crippled by preventable diseases. if you think the health care system is under strain now try adding an outbreak of polio. not only will kids get it but they will pass it on to adults as well.
when i see idiots refusing to vaccinate their kids, i just want to grab them and shake the bastards while shoving pictures of the 1920's polio outbreak in their face.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
I'd suggest looking up the mortality rates of the diseases you're failing to immunize against.
You don't think some scientist out there wouldn't love to be the guy who figured out autism, and make a fortune as an expert witness at the hundreds of thousands of lawsuits?
Yes, drug companies are no angels, but they are not omnipotent.
Exactly. It is like penicillin, which to most of the world is a life saver, but to me and my GF it would be a death sentence due to anaphylactic shock. If only 1% of the children given the vaccine end up with autism because of it that is STILL a pretty damned big number of kids. As a parent I can understand those that prefer to error on the side of caution, because even with 1000 to 1 odds against it happening that is still your kid that you are risking.
Putting aside the fact that there is no evidence linking vaccine to autism, are you saying that this hypothetical risk outweighs the very real risk of deadly diseases such as measles and mumps? As a parent, it infuriates me to see scientifically-illiterate parents put my vaccinated children at risk by contributing to the failure of herd immunity.
As a parent I can understand those that prefer to error on the side of caution, because even with 1000 to 1 odds against it happening that is still your kid that you are risking.
But anyone looking at the statistics would see that erring on the side of caution would be to get the vaccine. Those diseases can cause serious complications or death, and while there is no actual proof of the whole autism claim, there is overwhelming proof of the effectiveness of the vaccine in providing immunity.
Even starting with the premise that the vaccine does have a 0.1% chance of causing autism, measles has a mortality rate much higher than that, especially in undeveloped countries. And it is HIGHLY contagious.
I believe in global warming and all that. But desertification is mostly NOT caused by global warming. It is caused by over grazing, deforestation, and removal of water from an area (think dams and irrigation). It is also a self perpetuating cycle (dunes spread). Just wanted to clear that up.
This should be old news. Wakefield's hypothesis has long since been jumped on, ground into the dirt, ignored, badmouthed and laughed at by a lot of autism caregivers (unfortunately, not all... and the new big thing in autism care is "alternative" treatments, which is a whole other can of worms). The argument's not going to end, though. As another poster said: people need something to blame, and this is one thing that everyone's "heard" from someone, reputable or not.
As someone who works with autism on a daily basis (I am a behavioral therapist in early intervention wraparound services), it frustrates me endlessly that we're focusing on something so trivial as finding a single cause for autism when it's beginning to look more and more like there are a constellation of causes, each one probably dependent on the presence of several others and a genetic predisposition toward autistic behaviors. I'd rather see funding go toward long-term care; more and more of these kids are growing up without the right care and intervention, and those kids when they reach adulthood will be the ones you'll see on the news: vagrants because the state won't provide care any more, filling our jails because of misunderstandings caused by a lack of socially appropriate behavior, or worse - violent and hospitalized because their caregivers can't or won't take care of them any more. What happens when that cute kid with autism grows up to be that 6' tall, 250lb adult with autism? I know one of those kids. He's in and out of the hospital because he can't take care of himself and abuses his spineless mother. When she dies, he'll be a constant drain on the system. And here we are debating the vaccine link.
Waiting for the news that more states are approving funding for Autism care and proven wraparound services under mental health/disability guidelines...
Which would have been at the same time we stopped calling them retards and sending them off to the nuthouse.
First, the problem with statistics is that they deal in huge quantities to be accurate, and, the human body is sufficiently complex that lurking behind any "outlier" might exist a causal relationship for just that person.
Second, the medical establishment has made some spectacular mistakes through the years and people simply do not trust them.
By anyone's admission, the number of medical mistakes and fatalities from them are so enormous that literally every family has a story where the doctor screwed up. Advice given out by the medical community has changed, as well.
At one point in time, the medical establishment advocated a diet of four food groups, one of which would turn out to be loaded in cholesterol. At one point in time, antibiotics were hailed as the end of bacterial infections, and now medicine is essentially backpedalling against a resurgance in diseases once thought "cured".
Most damningly though, is, the whole question of whether or not medical science is actually worth the expense. Some studies have shown that once you factor out hygeine and nutrition, the lifespan of humans has not actually changed in 100 years. Essentially, if you get a virus, you will either recover or not, and bacterial infections are actually not common enough to really effect the larger course of affairs.
Finally, the politicization of science has happened even in medicine. The whole concept of the university, and by extension, the doctor was of someone who earned a decent living but was removed from the field of genuine wealth in order to be free from not only its temptations, but its distractions. Now, we have very real cases where doctors are rigging double blind studies in order to try and sell stock in their biotech company, manipulating the lives of real patients solely to cash in.
Who do you trust in medicine these days? Who do you trust in science? As soon as universities started amassing huge patent warchests and enormous funds, as soon as science got -expensive-, it became political, and because it is political, it cannot be trusted, as much as nothing else political can be trusted.
This is my sig.
We're talking about profound changes in behaviour within a day of getting a vaccine. When your child stops talking right after injecting a bunch of live viruses into their body there is a tendency to blame it on the live viruses.
Who's talking about this? That post said a week, now it's the same day for a developmental disorder to suddenly transform the child? Are there any cases of this in any of the studies where children were given vaccines and then observed? No? Huh.
And since the effects of the live virus, and mercury poisoning (if it was the kind of mercury that could poison you) are well known, and aren't spontaneous autism, that leaves me with another hypothesis:
Parents ignored the symptoms before, but suddenly became aware when sensitized by fear of vaccines. Their fear and paranoia probably just make the child's already existent symptoms (i.e. introversion) worse.
Granted I have no evidence for this theory applying to any particular case, but it has one big advantage of at least being consistent with the existing scientific evidence.
Much like if they ate something that they never ate before then puked, there would be a tendency to blame the food for them getting sick.
Even if they'd been feeling a little queasy before but wrote it off as nothing. Even if it turned out that they had the flu and the food had nothing to do with it.
Yes, I know people have this tendency. However that tendency often leads to incorrect conclusions.
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as someone who has done research in this problem, there are tons of things in vax's that don't need to be there.. Aluminum? Did you know that was in your vax?
Oh noes! Not the metal that is present in all the food you eat and the water you drink! That's obviously what's causing this problem with vaccines!
There are tons of preservatives that in small doses are fine, but when your kids get 3 - 8 vaccines in one visit, that starts to add up. Where does it stop? When do we let the human body do what it does?
When does it stop? It stops when our children are safe from measels, mumps, and rubella. It stops when we are assured that the diseases that ravaged our ancestors -- who would look on you with HORROR that you think you're better off risking getting these diseases -- will no longer plague us.
And hello? Letting the human body do what it does is what vaccines are all about. Let the immune system train itself to fight off the disease naturally. Oh, but you meant "let the body do what it does" without the influence of modern medicine. Well, in that case "what the body does" is maybe go blind, become sterile, or catch pneumonia and die.
And I'd say "you go on ahead and do that", but the problem is that your stupid choice affects me and my children. It affects everyone. You've done the research, eh? Ever come across the term "herd immunity"?
What about the kids who GET the vaccine and the infect other children (because the vaccine itself is contagious)????
Thankfully not much of a problem when everyone is getting vaccinated. Since rises in increases in incidents of measles and other disease can be directly associated with falling vaccination rates, I'm thinking maybe getting vaccinated is the better idea!
The enemies of Democracy are
You believe that the H1N1 vaccine gives people the swing flu...
Better the Swing Flu than Flamenco Fever, baby!
Don't even give it a second thought. I've got a friend who didn't give her kid any vaccines and yet he's still placed on the autistic spectrum. Anyone who thinks it's due to the vaccines is, quite simply, wrong.
0x09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
Studies have pretty convincingly shown that people who work with children with autistic spectrum disorders (such as my wife) are about 95% accurate at diagnosing the disease based upon video of their 1st birthday parties. In other words, they where showing symptoms before the vaccines in question were given. Parent may not recognize the symptoms until their child hit 30 months, but the symptoms where there all along. Parents often will deny the diagnosis (and get mad at the diagnosing physician) after it is made. It's understandable why they do so. It's also understandable why the need to find someone or something apart from their own genome to blame for the disease.
One study is at this site. It is by no means the only one, but just the first one that showed up in a Google search.
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Even starting with the premise that the vaccine does have a 0.1% chance of causing autism, measles has a mortality rate much higher than that, especially in undeveloped countries.
I was doubting your claim of a "much higher" mortality rate for measles, but after a quick web search it appears you're right - if we're talking about worldwide mortality. One UNICEF article states that "measles infects 25 to 30 million children each year and kills over 345,000", which is about 1.15%, an order of magnitude higher than the 0.1% chance for autism you stated (from which source, btw?). On the other hand, in countries where professional medical care is more advanced and/or more available to the general public, the mortality rates are much, much lower. According to this article, the mortality rate for acute (!) cases in the U.S. was about 0.25% - 0.28%. Between 1993-1999, there was only one reported death. Given that the complications of a measles infection can generally be handled when adequate medical care is available, and that autism is (as far as we know) "final", the decision isn't quite as clear-cut as you present it.
That's assuming that your 0.1% figure is accurate. FWIW, I'm not in any way opposed to the MMR vaccination, and I'm not buying the autism scare either. Where I live, this vaccine is administered to children systematically, and hardly anybody ever opts out.
CJ
Ah, arrogance and stupidity, all in the same package. How efficient of you. -- Londo Mollari
when i see idiots refusing to vaccinate their kids, i just want to grab them and shake the bastards while shoving pictures of the 1920's polio outbreak in their face.
Exactly. Oh man, we are so on the same page on this. These fools obviously have no idea of the kind of human suffering they are avoiding because of vaccines.
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It certainly raises a red flag for me when you consider that a single vaccine can give a child an exposure 5-10x the OSHA limit for mercury poisoning.
It doesn't. The OSHA limit is for chronic exposure to methylmercury. Thimerosal exposes you (via breakdown) to ethylmercury, and only once. It's the wrong substance and is a non-chronic exposure. There is not an established toxicity for ethylmercury, as far as I recall -- it is generally thought that the toxicity is lower than methylmercury, and so the limits for methylmercury are used. (But again, the limit you are referring to is the chronic-exposure limit.)
Yes. In fact, the common myth is that the Amish, who don't vaccinate their children, also don't get autism. Those who study autism know this isn't true: the Amish are useful as a study population because of their limited interaction with modern medicine, and there are still Amish with autism.
On the other hand, there are PROVEN bad reactions to almost every vaccination. The next opportunity you get to watch a doctor stick needles into an infant or a young child, STAY ALERT. You will see that the legal guardian is offered brochures on each and every vaccination. Take those brochures, and read them. Take the information from them, and research.
Writing stuff like this makes you look rather silly. When you go and get vaccinations the doctor plainly tells you what the risks are and if you are interested you can ask for more information. You don't have to STAY ALERT - you can just follow what the doctor tells you and keep an eye on potential symptoms. There are potential side-effects to all medicine, including vaccines, this should not be a surprise to anyone.
As for mercury in vaccines - you now don't believe what the "huge corporations" tell you even though they are the ones that print the PROVEN side-effects on the vaccines, and the brochures. The same procedures that discovered and reported on the side-effects would have also found any negative effects from the mercury. You can find more information about mercury in vaccines here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiomersal_controversy
Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
Except that the consequences are not his alone. Humans have developed "herd immunity" due to vaccines; there is not enough prevalence of the pathogen for infection to pass amongst the population. By not vaccinating your child, you are compromising the herd immunity and that may lead to the illness or death of someone else's child who could not be vaccinated for other legitimate reasons, like allergy.
Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis
True enough. The problem is that when hundreds of millions get some treatment, quite a few of those WILL (for entirely unrelated reasons) fall ill shortly after the treatment, thus the existence of these people prove nothing at all.
Like a doctor commented: If 10 million people get the H1N1 vaccine, you'll have around 8000 that die within a month after getting the vaccine. Proof that the vaccine is dangerous ? No, just the result of the fact that in a sample of 10 million, around 8000 will die EVERY month. And if you offer the vaccine first to the weakened, the elderly, those who are typically the most at risk, then the death-numbers will look even worse.
Besides, the question is never if something is entirely safe. The proper question is, is it safer than the alternative. Even if a vaccine -does- have side-effects (and all of them do, to varying degrees) it can still be totally worth it, if the total suffering from side-effects is significantly smaller than the suffering from the disease would otherwise be.
Also consider this: nobody has absolute proof that vaccines DON'T cause autism.
Also consider this: nobody has absolute proof that my rock DOESN'T repel tigers.
With the first link, the chain is forged.