Wakefield Has Company
Jan 2011http://www.vaccinationnews.com/wakefield-has-company
Is there a vaccine-autism link? Is Andy Wakefield a crazy man? The gap I see, as
a nutrition professional who has worked with children with autism for twelve
years, is in a willingness to open our minds, to consider studies that
corroborate Wakefield’s work. I am weary of doing the literature search over and
over, handing out these links (below) again and again – the ones the media
ignore so handily. Your pediatrician likely doesn’t know that Wakefield is not
alone. I challenge physicians out there to pause, breathe, read the studies, and
wonder. Think it through: What if he’s right?
I notice that most doctors, parents, journalists and bloggers who are shouting
about what a fraud Dr. Wakefield is are more voyeurs on the autism controversy
than anything else. Most often, they don’t see many patients with autism, don’t
treat them for anything beyond prescribing Miralax or Abilify, or aren’t raising
children with autism themselves. Or maybe I should say, they don’t see their
poop, their growth charts, endoscopy reports, stool cultures, or food intakes.
They don’t see how physically ill these children are, up close and stinky. How
many autism diapers have they changed? You know, the ones with the explosive
gold lumpy liquid that soars up the child’s neck and seeps down to his knees,
six or eight times a day? How many toilets have they unclogged or replaced,
after one too many enormous, stone-hard stools filled it? How many impacted
colons have they cleared in young children with autism? How many failure to
thrive children with autism have they worked with, to restore normal nutrition
status and good health? This is what I’m mucking through at work on a regular
basis as I provide nutrition care. Either in a child’s history, parent
interview, or in a kid’s pants right in my office. Do I want to see it, mom
asks? Why, yes I do, I always answer. And I want to culture it too. So off we go
collecting that stool sample, right then and there. Let’s do something about it.
Let’s do something about the myths relentlessly repeated now about measles and
Andrew Wakefield too.
First, there are fewer, not more, children getting measles in the UK since
Andrew Wakefield voiced his concerns for the bundled MMR vaccine. See this
analysis for data on measles cases pre and post Wakefield.
And, no, your child is not certain to die from measles if unvaccinated against
it, unless he happens to be in profoundly weak status for vitamin A, iron,
protein, and body mass index. Those nutrition parameters are strong predictors
of how children manage most any infectious disease, and measles in particular.
They are so strong, in fact, that protocols for using vitamin A to prevent and
treat measles have long existed for UNICEF and the World Health Organization. A
child in strong nutrition status typically passes through measles quickly with
no lasting ill effect, and then has permanent immunity. This does not mean
children never catch or die of measles. It does mean that measles is a highly
survivable routine illness that healthy, well-nourished children overwhelmingly
survived in the pre-vaccine era – just as my siblings did, who passed immunity
to me.
Thirdly, I would also point out (groan, again) that Wakefield’s infamous
original Lancet article was a case series. Which means, it did not test a
hypothesis that MMR causes autism, nor did it intend to. It did not state this
at all, as the media relentlessly hypes. I wonder how many MDs have actually
read this original article, or even know the findings published there. The real
tragedy is that the message of that original case series has been long lost in
the sensationalist media cacophony. Again, think: What if he’s right? Would
Pharma, CDC, FDA, AAP, ACIP, UK GMC, and NIH stand up and say – “Oops. We’re
sorry.” Would the US go into even greater financial arrears, to pay the hundreds
of thousands of injured families the billions they would be due?
These are colossally powerful, profitable entities. If there is trouble with
bundled vaccines like MMR, what a tidy solution if Wakefiled is indeed a monster
and a fraud. But I don’t think he is, after reviewing food intakes, GI sx,
growth patterns, medical histories, and developmental histories on hundreds of
children with autism.
Enough lamenting. I’m always asked, so here are some citations for the
uninitiated. Wakefield has company. Can all these journals and authors be wrong
as well? Here’s one that I can’t link to because it has vanished from PubMed
(hmmm it was there two days ago), so here is the full citation:
Sheils O, Smyth P, Martin C, O’Leary JJ. Development of an ‘allelic
discrimination’ type assay to differentiate between the strain origins of
measles virus detected in intestinal tissue of children with ileocolonic
lymphonodular hyperplasia and concomitant developmental disorder. J Pathol 2002;
198 (suppl): 5A.
Wakefield’s company includes other researchers, and other vaccines beyond the
MMR. For example, hepatitis B vaccine at birth was found to triple risk for
autism in this retrospective study
http://bit.ly/rKeth A
horrifying vindication for a book I published in 2002 When Your Doctor Is Wrong:
Hepatitis B Vaccine & Autism.
This one shows a “hyperimmune” response to MMR in children with autism:
http://bit.ly/fXmchZ
Oh alright, I will keep going…Here’s a 2010 chart review finding ileal or
colonic lymphonodular hyperplasia in 73% of subjects with autism
http://bit.ly/cr0HAL and
this one saw a strong association between MMR vaccination and CNS autoimmunity
in children with autism
http://bit.ly/eTH7Vg and this one documents intestinal permeability (“leaky
gut”) occuring 7x more frequently in subjects with autism compared to controls
http://bit.ly/aYirdO
...Here’s a page with over twenty citations and analysis collected in one spot
for MMR-autism:
http://www.jabs.org.uk/pages/thrower.asp
Okay I’ll stop. There is more, you can keep going down this rabbit hole if
you like. You’ll find Wakefield has plenty of company.
Lastly, we never hear much about this study, perhaps the most chilling of all.
It is the only one to date that reviews the immunization schedule as it is given
to human infants – something the FDA never required anybody to do before
allowing our children to be given dozens of vaccines in a short time span, as
many as twelve or fifteen in one day, as I have seen on my patients’ vaccine
records. It was a prospective case controlled study with primates, the closest
animal model to humans that we can use. Do you know the outcome? Read it and
weep, for our children. They are not victims of Wakefield. They are victims of
ignorance and greed. We owe them more research, solutions to the
neurodevelopmental disorders and autism they now suffer in unprecedented
numbers, and truth.