vezano uz Wakefielda:
mmr the debate that won't go away
[quote]Then, earlier this month, Dr Bernardine Healy, former head of the National Institutes of Health, America's medical research agency, told CBS News: "I think that the public health officials have been too quick to dismiss the [autism link to vaccination] hypothesis as irrational." She called for detailed studies of children whose parents believe they have been affected. "I have not seen major studies that focus on 300 kids who got autistic symptoms within a period of a few weeks of the vaccines," she said.

Healy's comments are significant because she's the first figure from the mainstream medical establishment not to dismiss the link.

Next month David Kirby, author of the award-winning book Evidence of Harm, will be in London giving a public lecture and addressing the House of Lords about the causes of regressive autism (as opposed to classic autism, which does not involve a sudden loss of speech and other functions).

The focus of his attention is not MMR but thiomersal, a preservative containing mercury (a known neurotoxin) that is used in some vaccines, including those for flu. (The Department of Health is keen to stress that no children's vaccine in this country has contained thiomersal for the past four years, and when it was formerly used in childhood vaccines it was at levels that were lower than those in the US.)

"A convergence of events," Kirby says, "has highlighted the importance of research, treatment and identifying the minority of children who may be susceptible to vaccine damage."

Chief among these convergent events is the case of Hannah Poling, the nine-year-old daughter of neurologist Jon Poling, from Georgia. In July 2000, aged 19 months, she received five different vaccinations, against a total of nine diseases, in one day. Her mother Terry says that when she entered the surgery, she was a bright - even precocious - child. Within 48 hours, she had stopped eating, ceased to respond to speech and become prone to episodes of screaming and fever.

Hannah Poling's case is part of the Omnibus Autism Proceeding - 5,000 cases of regressive autism being looked at by the US Vaccines Court, a body funded by a 75 cent levy on every vaccine given in the US. In February, the US government agreed compensation for her disabilities, having conceded, out of court, that her condition had been "significantly aggravated" by vaccination.

Initially, her case didn't appear to be of widespread significance because she was found to have a dysfunction of the mitochondria, the "batteries" in our cells that produce energy essential for normal functioning. This abnormality made her an unsuitable test case in any legal proceedings.

But then the next child under consideration as a test case was found to have a similar weakness, raising the possibility that a small minority of children may, because of a genetic predisposition, be more susceptible to the damaging side-effects of vaccination.

"It now looks as if 20 per cent of children with regressive autism may have this weakness; some are saying 65 per cent," says Kirby. "The cause of this weakness could be genetic or environmental."


The last point is crucial. Jon Poling, Hannah's father, believes two triggers are needed before a child becomes severely ill: possibly, an early vaccination which might compromise a child's metabolic system, then a later one which results in symptoms. There are various theories why this might be so. According to David Kirby, even trace elements of mercury and aluminium (also used in vaccines) might damage the mitochondria and could be passed from mother to foetus.

The actor Jim Carrey and his wife Jenny McCarthy believe that McCarthy's son, Evan, was "vaccine-damaged" four years ago, aged two. "In the Eighties. children received only 10 vaccines by age five, whereas today they are given 36 immunisations, most of them by age two," says McCarthy. "With billions of pharmaceutical dollars, could it be possible that the vaccine programme is becoming more of a profit engine then a means of prevention?" On June 4 they will be leading a march in Washington DC, waving banners saying "Too many. Too soon."

To date there has been no successful legal challenge to MMR in the UK. There is a Vaccine Damage Payments Unit which was set up in 1979, following concerns that the whooping cough (pertussis) vaccine could cause brain damage (the vaccine has since been changed).
However, compensation is capped at