Once again the MMR vaccine and the causes of autism has hit the headlines to a chorus of groans from medics and scientists across the country. This is a story that's painful to read and it fuels the bizarre notion that doctors are out to get the public and damage their babies in underhand ways. This particularly paranoid notion was formed in the pre-Victorian era when doctors were little more than disease propagators moving from sick house to sick house taking illness with them as they went and providing no cures, diagnostics or drugs. Unfortunately this image persists in one form or another even today.
Andrew Wakefield and his autism views have been discredited so many times in so many ways. But the fact that this story is still running is worrying for those involved in researching the real causes of autism as well as those who provide medical care for the wider public in general. When you study immunology at medical school you may be shown a video of a young child dying from whooping cough. Watching a young baby desperately gasping for it's last few breaths makes for pretty distressing viewing even for those without children of their own. The point being vaccinate, vaccinate, vaccinate!
Not only does MMR [the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine] not cause autism, it protects against three major killer diseases that claim the lives of millions of people. Now isn't that a great offer for the price of one little needle just once in your child's life?
Vaccines are life-savers: millions of people across the world are alive and healthy today because they were vaccinated against a spectrum of dieases when they were children. To not immunise is not only downright stupid and self-absorbed, it's dangerous. Vaccines should be mandatory as they are in the US. In contrast to here in the UK, in the US all children have to be vaccinated according to a set programme by law. Children cannot enrol at school unless they have a full set of injections.
The programmes by which these little miracles are delivered are quite simple. Depending on the nature of the disease and the type of vaccine, children and young adults are injected at a point in their lives when they are healthy and their immune systems are robust and can usefully process the little bits of information the vaccine serum gives them. By this process the majority of the population will not get the disease and therefore those who are too young or too sick to receive the vaccine will also not get the disease because it does not survive in the community.
If people start opting out of these life-saving programmes for bizarre social reasons then it is not only their children they are putting at risk but newborn babies and immuno-compromised individuals who cannot have the vaccine yet who will almost certainly get sick and perhaps die.
My friend Amy had a baby eight months ago - a very healthy little boy called Thomas. Within six months this little lad contracted whooping cough and was on a ventilator in a special baby unit. It's extremely distressing to see your baby son lying prone in a plastic cot with tubes down his throat and intravenous lines going into his limbs. Luckily he survived but we do not yet know what the lasting damage may be. This would not have happened if the herd immunity had been such that the disease could not survive within the community.
When I was born in the late 1970's, hundreds of thousands of babies died or were left brain damaged due to whooping cough because mothers opted out of vaacine programmes that would have kept their children safe. That this should still be happening in the 21st century is crazy. We have the means to stave off killer diseases and we are not using them.
I am a libertarian by nature but on this subject I'm prepared to be very patriarchal and say that I agree with compulsory vaccinations. Making vaccines mandatory is the easiest and cheapest way of preventing disease and side-stepping those who fuel the overheated imaginations of anxious parents.
· Alex Thomas is a medical student