A new study finding no evidence of a link between MMR and autism [1] was widely trumpeted by the media.

It compared 1,294 children diagnosed with autism or other pervasive development disorders (PDDs) between 1987 and 2001 in England and Wales with 4,469 children of the same sex and similar age who were registered with the same general practices but did not have a recorded diagnosis of autism. Around 80% of both the autism and non-autism groups had received an MMR jab.

The validity of the study was challenged. It was based on the UK General Practitioner Research Database (GPRD - diagnostic reports from GPs), whose validity as a basis for epidemiological research has been widely criticised. The GPRD stands accused in particular of massively under-reporting diseases like autism. These are often diagnosed by educational specialists rather than GPs, so not included.

The findings of a much larger and significant study [2] covering 537,304 children published around the same time went largely unpublicised. It was a re-run of the 2002 Danish MMR-autism study, [3] (which found no evidence of a link between MMR and autism and was widely publicised by the UK Department of Health) but this time also included children aged five and over rather than cutting off at four years old.

The re-run found that the Danish autism rate had in fact risen eightfold over the period since the introduction of MMR. Even were greater awareness and better diagnosis of autism judged to account for half of these cases (a very generous allowance), that would still leave an extremely significant fourfold increased risk. The researchers accepted that they had not proven a link between MMR and autism, but claimed to have shown that the original study was fundamentally flawed.

A separate re-analysis by Dr Samy Suissa of McGill University in Montreal (Canada) of the data gathered by the original 2002 Danish study [4] came up with an even more astonishing result. Contrary to the original ‘no link’ finding, it showed that diagnoses of autism within two years of an MMR jab had increased to a high of 27.3 cases per 100,000 children compared with just 1.45 cases per 100,000 in non-vaccinated children. The MMR-vaccinated children were 45% more likely than the non-MMR vaccinated children to have developed autism.

None of these studies differentiated between autism in general and the ‘regressive autism’ highlighted by Dr Andrew Wakefield and others, where a child whose neurological development appears to be normal starts to regress (about 10% of autism cases).

Ed.- In 2004, Dr Andrew Wakefield (who first suggested a possible link between the MMR vaccine and ‘regressive’ autism in 1998) and Dr Carol Stott of Cambridge University showed that autism cases in Denmark had increased by 14.8% each year since MMR jabs were introduced. [5]

Several questions need to be answered:

• Why are researchers not differentiating between autism in general and ‘regressive autism’?
• The Danish researchers must have known that the Danish Health Service only diagnoses autism at five years old plus. Why did they limit their study to children under five?
• Why has the UK and US media given the Danish study re-run so little coverage?

and going back ...

• Why was the 1992 mass MMR programme in the UK followed a year later by a sudden rise in autism levels?
• Why were further mass MMR campaigns in late 1994 and in 1996 both followed by sudden and steep rises in autism figures a year later?

Can there any longer be doubt that the medical establishment wants to obscure any possible link between ‘regressive autism’ and the MMR jab? Dr Dick van Steenis believes that ‘regressive autism’ is most likely when a Diphtheria-Pertussis-Tetanus (DPT) jab , which until 2004 contained the mercury-based preservative thimerosal, is followed by the MMR jab. He calls for a study based on real children (rather than more or less accurately compiled databases) which compares children with ‘regressive autism’* with healthy children, dividing them into four groups: unvaccinated; vaccinated with the Diphtheria-Pertussis-Tetanus (DPT) jab only; vaccinated with MMR only; vaccinated with the Diphtheria-Pertussis-Tetanus (DPT) jab then vaccinated with MMR.

* i.e. not general autism, which can be caused by many factors.