In the February 27, 1998, issue of The Lancet, Andrew Wakefield, MD, and 13 colleagues reported on a new syndrome involving inflammatory bowel disease and autism in children. Eight out of 12 normal children who developed severe intestinal disorders soon after an MMR vaccination also became autistic. Previously, five of those eight children had reacted adversely to vaccinations.

The team of British scientists, who had inadvertently stumbled upon the connection while studying Crohn’s disease and other inflammatory bowel dysfunction in children, emphasized that they had not proved a cause-and-effect relationship. They called for more studies to investigate whether persistent viral infection, either from natural disease or live virus vaccines, can lead to central nervous system damage in some children.

Nevertheless, in the same issue of The Lancet, CDC officials Robert Chen, MD, and Frank DeStefano, MD, charged in an editorial that "vaccine safety concerns such as that reported by Wakefield and colleagues may snowball" when the public and the media "confuse association with causality and shun immunization." Other CDC officials discounted the study’s importance, saying that the children’s health problems were "coincidental" and not caused by vaccination.

Soon after, a Reuters newswire story quoted Johns Hopkins’s Halsey saying it was "highly inappropriate" for Wakefield and his colleagues to discuss a possible connection between the children’s health problems and measles or MMR vaccines. Wakefield was later called before the Medical Research Council where British, U.S., and WHO health officials criticized his report for unnecessarily scaring the public.

In contrast, autism experts defended Wakefield.

Bernard Rimland, who has a PhD in experimental psychology and is founder and director of the Autism Research Institute in San Diego, said, "It is ludicrous to claim that the link between many causes of autism and vaccination is just coincidental. Dr. Wakefield’s group has greatly expanded our understanding of one possible mechanism. The blunt truth is that some children are harmed by vaccinations. Research, not denial, is the proper response to this report."

Portia Iverson, founder and president of CAN, the Cure Autism Now foundation in Los Angeles, also took issue at the government-led criticism: "Approximately one-half of the hundreds of parents who call our office each month report that their child became autistic shortly after receiving a vaccination. Isn’t it the responsibility of the government to take a pro-active position on behalf of these children rather than a defensive one?"

Although the medical literature identified only a handful of cases in the 1940s, by the mid-1960s, after the DPT vaccine had been widely used and the measles vaccine introduced, autistic children began flooding doctors’ offices. (Parents in the U.S. and Canada who report vaccine-associated autism most often mention that their children’s autistic behaviors followed DPT or MMR vaccination.) Today, 1 in 1,000 children are diagnosed as autistic, making autism more prevalent among children than cancer, multiple sclerosis, or cystic fibrosis. A recent California study put the figure at 1 in 312 children, a 273 per cent increase between 1987 and 1998. [link to www.mercola.com]