MMR vaccine linked to bowel problem
From The Mail on Sunday    April 9, 2000   by Lorraine Fraser

For Rosemary Kessick it was a moment of vindication. And of utter sadness. On the screen before a hearing of the powerful US Congress Committee on Government Reform, the pictures of her son William flashed up.

To the left was a bright-eyed baby with everything to look forward to; on
the right, the dull countenance of the child he became - severely
brain-damaged, and trapped in the nightmare world of autism.

Minutes later, she heard the scientific announcement hundreds of parents
of autistic children such as William have waited for.

Under oath, and speaking in a calm Irish lilt, Professor John O-Leary
told how his state-of-the art laboratory had identified the measles virus - something which certainly should not have been there - in samples taken
from the intestines of no fewer than 24 or the 25 patients with William's
condition.

The findings of his vitally important study, reported for the first time
in Thursday's Congressional hearing on autism provide compelling new
evidence linking measles virus infection and this terrible affliction.

And they raise urgent new concerns over the safety of MMR vaccine - the combined mumps, measles and rubella vaccination given routinely to
hundreds of thousands of children in Britain every year.

It is more than five years since Rosemary Kessick, desperate to find out
why her previously healthy baby had developed terrible bowel problems and was suddenly behaving uncontrollably, first sought out the man who provided Professor O'Leary with those crucial biopsies from the autistic children.

She approached Dr. Andrew Wakefield, an honorary consultant gastro-
enterologist at the Royal Free Hospital in London and an acclaimed
researcher on inflammatory bowel disease.  He had never before seen a child like William, whose autism had descended on him almost overnight. And when he examined the lining of his bowel with a fibre-optic camera, he was stunned to discover an inexplicable abnormality.

In February 1998, having seen 11 more patients with identical symptoms,
he dared to suggest that parents such as Rosemary, who believed their
children had developed autism after receiving the MMR vaccine, should now be taken seriously.

In a scientific paper, published in the leading medical journal The
Lancet, he and his colleagues described how they had discovered this same pattern of inflammation of the bowel, which they believed was part of a new disease, autistic enterocolitis, in all 12 children.

They reported that parents of eight of the children said that the
youngsters ' behaviour began to deteriorate after their MMR vaccinations.

While there was no direct evidence of a link, Dr. Wakefield said it must
be properly investigated. He stressed he was not anti-vaccine, and only
wanted safe vaccination programmes for children.

But within the medical establishment there is no greater heresy than to
even question the safety of a childhood vaccine. Dr. Wakefield was quickly accused of undermining parents' confidence in MMR and of putting children's lives at risk because large numbers of parents decided to shun it.

From that day on, he was ostracised by the medical community. His
meticulous studies on the 12 children - and subsequently hundreds more like them - were ignored by the Government and dismissed by 'experts' from the Medical Research Council. He was ordered by his bosses at University College London not to speak to the Press.

Now, says Professor O'Leary, a leading independent pathologist from the
Republic of Ireland, the new evidence from his laboratory must change all
that.

He is doubly concerned because another independent research group in
Japan has also found the measles virus in the blood of three of Dr. Wakefield's patients - and they say the genetic fingerprint is 'consistent' with the strain used in MMR vaccine. Further studies, he says, are now imperative.

He said: "The findings that I presented to Congress are the results of
independent work carried out by my laboratory on material referred to us
by Andrew Wakefield.

"The material that was given to us was sent in a blinded fashion. We did
not know the name of the patients, the diagnosis or age before our tests were completed. There was no bias in terms of changing diagnosis or changing results to suit a particular hypothesis."

He said that of the 25 children with autistic enterocolitis his laboratory
had screened, 24 harboured the measles genetic fingerprint. Only one of
the 15 control children - those who do not have autism - contained the
virus.

"That is 96 per cent compared with 6.6 per cent, which is highly
statistically significant and implies an association between the measles
virus and this disease." Said Professor O'Leary.

"Measles virus is present in the gut of these children. It shouldn't be
there. The next question is to find out what it is doing there and there
needs to be a full investigation of this with proper funding."

His laboratory - an internationally recognised centre of excellence - is
now urgently working on sequencing the genetic make-up of the virus to see if it matches the vaccine strain. It will be four to six months, he says,
before they will have the answer.

The biggest criticism fired at Dr. Wakefield when he first voiced his
concerns was that he had no evidence of vaccine viruses in tissue from
the autistic children he was studying.

But if his findings prove to be correct the implications will be enormous.
It will suggest that while MMR may be safe for the vast majority of
children, some - perhaps a minority who are somehow genetically
susceptible - may be seriously damaged by it.

Andrew Wakefield has now examined almost 150 children like William who, by all accounts, were beautiful, normal babies until something,
inexplicably, went wrong.                                     continued