VACCINES AND AUTISM

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VACCINES AND AUTISM

When the evidence is conclusive

By Trine Tsouderos

January 30, 2011

My young son came down with croup last week. The first night of it, I lay on the

floor next to his crib, anxious, listening to him breathe, counting his raspy

inhales and exhales between violent coughing fits. He suffered, we worried.

As all parents know, there is nothing like that 3 a.m. worry for a sick child.

Infectious diseases — the suffering, the anxiety, the potential for something to

go seriously, frighteningly wrong — are an unfortunate fact of life for both

children and their caretakers.

But we live in a time of relative ease compared to even just a generation or two

ago, thanks to vaccines that have largely vanquished some of childhood's most

dangerous and deadly infectious diseases.

That is changing, however, as more parents — many affluent and well-educated —

delay and even shun immunizations. They believe vaccines are riskier than the

diseases they prevent. Particularly, they believe the shots cause autism.

Many studies have been done, and it is now clear that these parents are simply

wrong. Still, pockets of unimmunized children are growing, herd immunity is

breaking down and these childhood diseases — worse than croup, worse than a bad

cold — are returning. Children are suffering and dying.

How and why this is happening is examined in two excellent books out this month.

Both are must-reads for parents and parents-to-be.

One is " Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All " by Dr.

Offit, co-inventor of one of the rotavirus vaccines and chief of infectious

diseases at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. (Disclosure: Offit's book

acknowledges my reporting.) The other is " The Panic Virus: A True Story of

Medicine, Science and Fear " by investigative journalist Seth Mnookin.

The books are well-timed, if only coincidentally so. This month, the British

Medical Journal published a lengthy screed on Dr. Wakefield, the man

whose 1998 study on 12 children with autism planted one of the first seeds of

fear about a link between vaccines and the disorder. The BMJ's pronouncement —

that Wakefield made up data and that his paper was fraudulent — capped quite a

year for the British physician, who not long ago was stripped of his right to

practice medicine in the United Kingdom and whose study recently was retracted

by the journal that printed it, The Lancet.

Both books recount the history of the current anti-vaccine movement, from an

error-riddled 1982 television segment titled " Vaccine Roulette " to Wakefield's

study and the improbable rise of celebrity McCarthy as an " expert " on

vaccine safety. Offit's book reaches back to the 1850s and the introduction of

the smallpox vaccine, which sparked an anti-vaccine movement in Britain that

echoes, in many ways, the movement of today.

Both Offit and Mnookin lay a lot of blame on the media that presented stories on

vaccines and autism with a sort of false balance — a " one-hand, other-hand "

approach that implies both sides are backed by approximately equal evidence.

Of course, that is fine if the evidence is pretty much equal, but in this case,

as with many medical issues, it was not. It wasn't even close.

Recounted in detail in both books, many studies have examined the safety of

vaccines and any possible link with autism. Millions of children have been

observed, many different ways, by many independent teams of researchers in many

different countries. No link has been found.

And yet, as Offit and Mnookin recount, many reporters continued to report as if

the link was proven, or a real possibility that had not really been studied.

Stories have paired experts talking about enormous studies with parents of

children with autism claiming the vaccines had given their children their

disorder as if both had equal scientific expertise and evidence.

" Anecdotes and suppositions, no matter how right they feel, don't lead to

universal truths; experiments that can be independently confirmed by impartial

observers do, " Mnookin writes. " Intuition leads to the flat earth society and

bloodletting; experiments lead men to the moon and microsurgery. "

Mnookin makes a plea for reason and to giving weight to facts, not feelings and

personal stories.

Speaking of his hopes for his baby son, he writes, " For his sake and the sake of

everyone else alive, I hope he grows up in a world where science is acknowledged

not as an ideology but as the best tool we have for understanding the universe

and where striving for truth is recognized as the most noble quest mankind will

ever undertake. "

Offit also makes a plea for us to think of others as well as ourselves and our

children. Every decision to vaccinate is a decision that affects everybody, he

writes. Remember, he pleads, what it was like after Sept. 11, " when we were part

of a whole. "

" If we can recapture it — recapture the feeling that we are all in this

together, all part of a large immunological cooperative — the growing tragedy of

children dying from preventable infections can be avoided, " Offit writes. " It's

in us: the better angels of our nature. "

It is the third night of my son's croup, and we are outside on the porch. It's

2:15 a.m. The street is deserted, it is just us. He is bundled in a blanket,

huddled in my arms, his chin on my shoulder. He is taking in cold winter air, a

supposed treatment for croup that seems like something dreamed up 100 years ago.

As we sit there, the books come to mind and I start thinking about the millions

of mothers who came before me, doing exactly as I am doing, holding our sick

children in the middle of the night. But for so many, their thoughts were much

darker — they worried their children would not make it, or that they would be

left blind, or deaf, or unable to walk. They worried their other children would

also fall ill, and suffer these fates.

My son, who has been inoculated against the worst possible outcomes, shivers.

I'm cold too. We get up, and go inside where it is safe and warm.

Trine Tsouderos is a Tribune science and medical reporter.