The MMR vaccine is administered between the ages of 12-15 months. When a child develops autism, their parents describe the disease as the child growing normally until they reach an age where a degenerative process starts. This problem usually happens around the age of 2 years. Although parents do say the child was growing normally, many researchers do not believe that the child was actually growing normally until the age of 1-2 years but some children do go through a degenerative process and this usually happens after the administration of MMR vaccine. The question is does MMR have a true relation with the development of autism or is it just a coincidence?
Doctor Andrew Wakefield had written a paper in Lancet journal in 1998 which suggested that MMR vaccine causes autism. In his research, he found out that MMR vaccine was responsible for bowel inflammation that leads to the translocation of non-permeable peptides into the bloodstream. (American Academy of Pediatrics) This in turn carries them to the brain causing the root of autism spectrum disorder to form. His research was called weak by drug corporations, governments and media companies and was then discredited earning him a fraud reputation. His paper has since raised a decade long argument on MMR vaccine originating autism spectrum disorder. This has caused a lot of parents to withdraw their children from being vaccinated, which increased measles infections.
Many studies and research projects have been carried out to find relevance between MMR and Autism. Patients with autism were found to have been harboring an increased number of antibodies to measles when a study was conducted on several patients of Autism. This study was published in medical journal researchers and it was...
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...also be mentioned that many studies worldwide have also concluded that MMR vaccine is not a definite cause of ASD. Did Dr. Wakefield’s research uncover something that could damage the medical industry? It is known that medicine manufacturers conceal harmful evidence from public eye to protect their business. Apart from the decade long debate on MMR being linked to ASD, there are still numerous studies and experiments carried out, that suggests MMR vaccines are a potential cause of Autism.
Works Cited
Text of May 5th 2008 email from US HRSA to Sharyl Attkisson of CBS News
Director National Immunization Program in a letter to the UK’s Chief Medical Officer 15 February 2002.
American Academy of Pediatrics, . N.p.. Web. 7 Mar 2014.
Haertlein, Lauren L. “Immunizing Against Bad Science: The Vaccine Court and The Autism Test Case.” Law and Contemporary Problems 72 (2012): 211-32. EconLit. Web. 16 Feb. 2014.
In 1999 a study was done in the United Kingdom to see if there was a link between the two. In this study, researchers compared children had had and had not gotten the measles, mumps and rubella vaccination. The study identified four hundred and ninety-eight cases of autism including core autism, atypical autism and Asperger syndrome in children born in the United Kingdom since 1979. There was an increase in cases by year of birth with no change after the introduction of the vaccination. There was also no age difference at diagnosis between the cases vaccinated before or after eighteen months of age and children that were never vaccinated. These results showed no temporal association between the onset of autism within one or two years after being vaccinated with MMR and developmental regression was not clustered in the months after vaccination. The data from these results does not support the connection between MMR and autism and if an association was to occur it was so rare it could not be identified. Many studies have been done over this topic but the results prove that it in fact does not cause autism. It is likely that this myth is strongly accepted because the symptoms of autism begin to occur around the same time as the child is to be vaccinated with the MMR
... a service which can help individuals and communities maintain optimum health. Immunisations are important in preventing communicable disease and health visitors are the key professionals in ensuring that families are aware of the seriousness of disease as well as the safety of immunisations. One way of ensuring that children receive immunisations would be to make them compulsory however this would mean that freedom of choice is removed and health visitors would need to police the public to ensure that they are attending appointments. In reality it would not be ethical to develop a law for immunisations therefore health promotion is the most efficient way to encourage parents to get their child vaccinated. With time the immunisation programme will grow as more diseases need to be prevented making the health visitors role in promoting them become even more important.
Each day researchers are finding out about vaccines and are realizing that there are a lot more risks than benefits. Dr Phillip F. Incao explains: “Today, far more children suffer from allergies and other chronic immune system disorders than from life-threatening infectious disease. It is neither reasonable nor prudent to persist in presuming that the benefits of any vaccination outweigh its risk” (qtd in Spaker). While infectious diseases are becoming uncommon there is no need for any person to get vaccinated. There have been many issues surrounding vaccinations all around the world.
18. Salmon, Daniel A. and Saad B. Omer, ‘Individual freedoms versus collective responsibility:immunization decision-making in the face of occasionally competing values’, Emerging Themes Epid, 3 (2006):
Despite all the testing and approval process of vaccines, many people still mistakenly believe that vaccines cause autism, even in light of research that has disproven the notion. This evidences the difficulty of dispelling false statements once someone has accepted a falsehood, especially if it has scientific research backing the results. It also highlights the gullibility of the public at large to believe anything that medical research reports without questioning the findings. Unfortunately, the media attention such examples of junk science receive aids in convincing many of its truthfulness. The hype surrounding the belief that vaccines cause autism began in 1998 when Andrew Wakefield in the UK published an article in the Lancet linking the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR...
"My child fell into autism directly after his 12 month MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine" (Stark). Her son Kieran was developing and acting like a normal child until his MMR vaccines (Stark). After the vaccines, Kieran developed a high fever, lethargic, and extreme diarrhea which eventually led him to be unresponsive, refuse to eat, and became mute (Stark). After 20 months of these symptoms, Kieran was diagnosed with autism (Stark). This parent is just one of millions that experience the same side effects of
North American children are now the most vaccinated on earth. Children receive about thirty-three doses of ten vaccinations by the age of five years. Not only do children need a separate vaccine for most diseases (hepatitis B, polio, Hib, and chicken pox are single vaccines; DTaP and MMR are multiple) but they generally need more than one dose of each vaccine. Because of the many vaccines needed, vaccination is an extremely controversial topic in the United States Today. Whatever side of the aisle you may fall with regard to your opinion about vaccination, one thing is for certain: the choice to vaccinate or not is a decision that has the potential to greatly impact the health of you and most importantly, your children for the rest of their lives.
connections, concentrating on certain activities and ignoring the others.( Gerber, Offit) Another major sign of an autistic child is they tend to do things in a repetitive pattern. (Gerber, Offit) In the article “Vaccines and Autism: A Tale of Shifting Hypotheses” by Jeffrey S. Gerber and Paul A. Offit it describes the three hypotheses that are proposed by Wakefield. First one being the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccines, “Although no data supporting an association between MMR vaccine and autism existed and a plausible biological mechanism was lacking, several epidemiologic studies were performed to address parental fears created by the publication by Wakefield.” (Gerber, Offit) There has been 22 studies all over the world regarding the
The Measles, Mumps ad Rubella (MMR) Vaccine was introduced as part of a vaccination programme in 1988, to vaccinate against three viruses, Morbillivirus measles virus, Rubulavirus (Mumps), and Rubivirus (Rubella), which caused three diseases which were commonplace in society before the start of the vaccination programme, and could often have fatal consequences. In this essay I intend to explore the controversy and risks associated with this vaccination and its components.
There are also many cases where many parents strongly believe that some vaccines may have caused autism in their children. The reason being that many parents noticed shortly after their child was vaccinated they noticed symptoms like loss of language abilities and they suddenly stopped interacting with people. Also, the vaccines used to treat measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) are linked to many autism cases. Vaccines that contain thimerosal, an organic compound that contains mercury, have also been suspected to cause autism in children. Thimerosal has been removed from most vaccines because of its linkage to autism.
In 2010, after an eight-year court process in the US federal vaccine injury compensation court it was concluded that the MMR vaccination did not cause autism in the six test cases that were examine by the court. Both theory one and theory two were found to be implausible (Kirkland, 237-261).
The most predominant and prevalent myth since 1998 is that vaccinations can cause autism. A report in 1998 was released through publication
In recent years, the correlation between vaccines and autism has become the subject of much debate. On one side, there are the anti-vaccinators, or anti-vaccers. On the other, there’s pretty much everyone else. Despite the fact that the anti-vaccination movement has little base in scientific fact, their campaign to end early infanthood vaccinations rages on. While doctors and scientists try desperately to make parents look at the research studies, vaccination rates continue to fall. But, even in these dark times, there is still hope that scientific fact will prevail and defeat the anti-vaccination fear mongers who have caused many children to fall ill and even die because their parents did not properly vaccinate them. This is one of the most saddening scientific failures of the twenty-first century. A failure to educate the public properly has resulted in child, even infant, fatalities. The anti-vaccination movement was started based on falsified data and continues only because of a lack of knowledge and proper education of the general public.
The CDC works closely with public health agencies and private partners in order to improve and sustain immunization coverage and to monitor the safety of vaccines so that public ...