Parents and advocates can stop worrying, and attorneys looking for a quick buck from pharmaceutical companies’ deep pockets, can stop focusing on MMR vaccine as the cause of a child’s autism. The latest review of over 1000 published reports indicates there is no association between MMR vaccine and autism, summarized in a report published in today’s New York Times.
“The M.M.R. vaccine doesn’t cause autism, and the evidence is overwhelming that it doesn’t,” Dr. Ellen Wright Clayton, the chairwoman of the panel, assembled by the Institute of Medicine, said in an interview. She was referring to a combination against measles, mumps and rubella that has long been a focus of concern from some parents’ groups.
The panel did conclude, however, that there are risks to getting the chickenpox vaccine that can arise years after vaccination. People who have had the vaccine can develop pneumonia, meningitis or hepatitis years later if the virus used in the vaccine reawakens because an unrelated health problem, like cancer, has compromised their immune systems. Dr. Clayton commented: “We looked at more than a thousand peer-reviewed articles, and we didn’t see many adverse effects caused by vaccines. That’s pretty remarkable.” August 26, 2011, on page A19 of the New York edition of the New York Times with the headline: Vaccine Cleared Again as Autism Culprit.
So why should you care about getting mumps? About five percent of people with Mumps develop pancreatitis, infection of the body's organ that regulates blood sugar and protects you agains Diabetes. From 1-10% develop meningitis, which causes high temperature (fever) of 38ºC (100ºF) or above, headache, nausea and vomiting. Encephalitis with hearing loss is relatively rare, but does occur with Mumps. The risk of Measles is more significant with 1 out of every 20 children with measles geting pneumonia, and about 1 child in every 1,000 who get measles will develop encephalitis with convulsions, and can leave the child deaf or permanent intellectual disability. For every 1,000 children who get measles, 1 or 2 will die from it. Measles also can make a pregnant woman have a miscarriage, give birth prematurely, or have a low-birth-weight baby.
The embedded graph shows the effect of the MMR Vaccine scare on the number of Mumps cases in the US. Makes no sense.