Steve_colour-se7en Report post Posted January 25, 2006 Hello everyone, Sorry the following came through to me yesterday, but I overlooked it however it seem this is better late than never A SCOTS family will launch a multi-million-pound lawsuit at the High Court in London today, claiming the MMR vaccine was responsible for causing autism in their child. The test case, which could open the floodgates to hundreds of similar actions, is set to reignite the fierce debate over the safety of the mumps, measles and rubella jab. for the rest of this news article http://news.scotsman.com/scotland.cfm?id=115342006 Steve.. I think the boy means well but he is distinctly inclined to be inattentive...... Tutor of Winston Churchill to Lord Randolph Churchill, Winston's father Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
ceecee Report post Posted January 25, 2006 All I can say is all the best to them.The mmr booster was definately responsible for causing my daughter's autistic encephalitus.Fortunately she recovered but we were told originally she would never recover and stay like that for life. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
microsoft_admin Report post Posted January 27, 2006 ooo that sounds intresting Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
call me jaded Report post Posted January 27, 2006 Does Laurence Prove That Some Doctors Want To Hide The Truth About MMR? By Sue Corrigan for the Mail, UK. Link not available. Dr Andrew Wakefield faces ruin because raised doubts about a controversial vaccination, but the astonishing story of this youngster's suffering - and cure - could be the vital clue that shows the scientist was right all along.. On the day just over three years ago that Prime Minister Tony Blair first triumphantly claimed victory for the Govern�ment in the fight to prove MMR safe, Sue McGowan was too busy even to notice. She was focusing all her attention on keeping her ten-year-old autistic son, Laurence, alive with the only thing he could still bear to swallow. 'Six teaspoons of cranberry juice, every half-hour. That's how critical it got in the end,' says the mother of four from Kenilworth, near Birming�ham. 'I took Laurence out of school in 2001, when he first began refusing food and looked after him at home by myself. Nobody came near us for the next two-and-a-half years.' It is just before Christmas and we are in a hotel room on Long Island, just off the coast of New York, on the final stage in Mrs McGowan's eight�-year quest to discover what is making her small, pale son so ill. In a few hours, 13-year-old Laurence is to undergo medical tests he could have had years ago in Britain, but has repeatedly been denied by doctors and NHS hospitals. His parents had to borrow ?7,000 to finance the trip. But now he will get the tests with two of the very few specialists in the world openly willing to investigate him. One is gastroenterologist and paediatrician Dr Arthur Krigsman, an associate professor at New York University. The other is Dr Andrew Wakefield, the clinical researcher driven out of Britain and now living in America after suggesting a link between a new form of bowel disease - which Laurence appears to suffer from - autism and the Measles, Mumps and Rubella (MMR) triple vaccination. With Laurence the first of a num�ber of autistic British children the two men have agreed to treat, and parent activists claiming there are at least 2 000 sick children who can't get treatment in Britain, a great deal hangs on the tests to be carried out on this snowy day in Long Island. If they show Laurence has long been suffering from a painful inflamma�tory disease that has gone untreated in the UK, as Dr Wakefield firmly believes they will, then the entire British political and medical estab�lishment's approach to the bitter MMR controversy will be open to new questioning. On the other hand, if the endo�scopies, tissue biopsies and blood tests show nothing, then the reputa�tion and standing of the already embattled Dr Wakefield will be fur�ther undermined. British doctors have repeatedly insisted there is nothing physically wrong with Laurence. If he is indeed just a 'fussy eater', or his bowel prob�lems are a standard by-product of brain damage, 49-year-old Dr Wake�field knows he'll be condemned for encouraging British parents to embark on an arduous and expensive wild-goose chase. Laurence began suffering from a strange, undiagnosed gut disorder from the age of five. By nine, he was shunning all food and most liquids. With a swollen, distended belly and stick-thin arms and legs, he weighed just two-and-a-half stone. Some time later he did start eating again, but that is when he also began screaming for hours at a time, hitting out violently and waking repeatedly through the night. Alternating between diarrhoea attacks and severe constipation, he also suffered two bowel haemorrhages last year. But the many doctors and hospitals his mother approached for help, responded oddly. As soon as she men�tioned her son was autistic, appoint�ments were refused or cancelled. A letter in Laurence's thick file of medical notes reveals that a gastro�enterologist at a Midland's hospital tried to have him admitted to a psy�chiatric ward without even examining him. Staff at another hospital sug�gested Social Services be called in, suspecting Mrs McGowan might be starving her son deliberately. In view of Laurence's obvious ill health, these responses bewildered his mother. 'Why not just investigate the child? It's pretty simple, isn't it?' Mrs McGowan says indignantly. 'No one would even explain to me why he couldn't have any tests, apart from just saying, over and over again, "It's his autism. It's all just part of being autistic." The best one casualty doc�tor could do, when I seriously thought Laurence was about to die, was sug�gest I try organising his food in a dif�ferent pattern on his plate.' So why couldn't the McGowans get medical help for their son any�where in Britain? And what of par�ents' claims that thousands of other autistic children around the UK are similarly being denied tests and treat�ment? In a six-week investigation, The Mail on Sunday has talked to many parents of autistic children throughout Britain about their experiences. One mother says the same gastroenterologist who tried to get Laurence admitted to a psychiatric ward refused to inves�tigate her desperately ill daughter too, saying only that any tests would be 'inappropriate'.. What would lead a doctor to say that to a mother pleading for help for her child? And why would an NHS consul�tant in a London teaching hospital tell another parent he would investigate her autistic son's intestinal problems if he could, but 'I'm not allowed'? The answer is that these children, and their symptoms, are the front line of the battle over MMR, and of claims that the live measles virus in the MMR triple vaccine may be caus�ing gut and brain damage. In an article published in the Lancet medical journal in 1998, Dr Wakefield and a team at London's Royal Free Hospital claimed to have discovered, in 12 brain-damaged children, a pre�viously unrecognised bowel disease, later dubbed by Wakefield 'autistic entero-colitis'. Colonoscopies performed on scores of autistic children and teenagers in the United States, Italy and Venezuela have since backed up his claim of an apparently new disease, differing in several crucial ways from the well �recognised inflammatory bowel dis�eases Crohn's and ulcerative colitis. Dr Wakefield's highly controversial assertion is that this new gut disease may be causing brain damage in cer�tain vulnerable children, resulting in a particular form of autism. Even leaving aside the vexed ques�tion of whether or not MMR jabs could be one cause of the bowel dam�age, this theory overturns decades of received medical wisdom; that autism is a genetic brain disorder with which children are born. According to the British medical and scientific establishments, this is a baseless medical scare story. They say there is no credible evidence a new form of bowel disease exists in autistic children, let alone that the live measles virus in the MMR jab, first given to children at around 13 months of age, may be causing it. Mr Blair declared the matter set�tled back in October 2002, when his official spokesman boasted at a Downing Street media briefing: 'We are winning the argument that MMR is safe.' The PR campaign designed to reassure nervous parents still had some way to go, the spokesman con�ceded, but 'intellectually', the Gov�ernment was winning its case. But this battle is not over, and caught in the middle of no-man's-land are thousands of children just like Laurence, repeatedly being refused even the most routine investigations. In many cases, doctors are refusing even to see children before announ�cing that tests aren't necessary. The very few gastroenterologists and paediatricians in Britain who are agreeing to investigate and treat autistic children with bowel disease are doing so not only in secrecy, but even fear. Their names are passed along a network of parent and scien�tific activists and none was willing to speak publicly. A senior paediatric gastroenterolo�gist at a major London teaching hos�pital did, however, agree to comment off the record. 'The points you raise about children with autism having difficulty in accessing medical ser�vices in Britain are well made and have been of concern to me for some time,' he said One mother says her GP refused to refer her autistic child to the Royal Free where some extremely ill children are still being investigated and treated, on the grounds that the specialists there had been 'discred�ited' for doing this work. Finding any form of bowel disease in autistic children is not, it seems, a smart career move these days, so many doctors are refusing even to look. Mrs McGowan says: 'They've all seen what happened to Dr Wake�field and they're petrified.' Later this year, Dr Wakefield and two former colleagues from the Royal Free face a hearing before the UK's General Medical Council on charges of professional misconduct relating to their original research. If found guilty all three could be struck off the med�ical register in the UK. The charges relate to Sunday Times allegations that the research was begun at the behest of lawyers act�ing for some 1,200 parents planning to sue MMR's three manufacturers, and was partly funded by a ?55,000 grant from the Legal Aid Board. Freelance reporter Brian Deer claimed Dr Wakefield concealed this from his fellow researchers and failed to declare the apparent con�flict of interest to The Lancet when submitting the team's findings. Dr Wakefield, who now runs a clinic for autistic children in Austin, Texas, is currently suing both Mr Deer and The Sunday Times for defamation, and says he is confident he will be cleared by the GMC. And he firmly believes the Long Island tests will show Laurence is suffering from bowel disease. Breaking a long, self-imposed media silence to speak to The Mail on Sunday, he said: 'There's nothing ambiguous or uncertain about Laurence's condition in my mind. He has all the appearances of a child with intestinal disease. 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007paul007 Report post Posted January 27, 2006 I read this yesterday and have just scanned a national newspaper and even been checking Sky News and there is no mention of it, considering what could happen if the families won this case I thought at least there would be a bit in the Daily Mirror regarding this or even a mention on Sky news. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
mossgrove Report post Posted January 27, 2006 I have read the article a couple of times but the 'Daily Mail Speak' inside it makes it difficult to determine what it is actually saying. I think there is probably a good article to be written on this topic, but I don't think this is it. If they show Laurence has long been suffering from a painful inflammatory disease that has gone untreated in the UK, as Dr Wakefield firmly believes they will, then the entire British political and medical establishment's approach to the bitter MMR controversy will be open to new questioning. I am not all that sure how this boy having a bowel disease proves the MMR vaccine is safe or unsafe, they seem less related than the article implies to me. Even leaving aside the vexed question of whether or not MMR jabs could be one cause of the bowel damage, this theory overturns decades of received medical wisdom; that autism is a genetic brain disorder with which children are born. There is no received medical opinion on this. Decades ago the refrigerator mother theory was top of the list, other theories have come and gone. There certainly appears to be a genetic link in some cases, but there is little consensus beyond the fact that Autism may well have more than one cause. What this article does to is highlight the stand-off that has been i place for the last few years. The evidence that MMR causes Autism relates almost exclusively to individual cases where a parent has observed thst a childs Autistic Systems began with the MMR jab, and I am not minimising the impact of this in any way and I can see why these parents are absolutely convinced of the dangers of MMR. On the other side of the coin many children may become gravely ill as a direct result of the reduction in vaccination rates. The vaccinations are not a random act of malevolence foisted on an unwilling public, they adress a serious and genuine public health issue. The problem in proving the negative effects of MMR is that numerically based studies (Where they count the proportion of children with Autism in a vaccinated population vs the proportion of children in the unvaccinated popultion) have failed to produce any clear or compelling eveidence that vaccines cause an increase in the numbers of children with Autism which is why succesive Governments have (this far) supported the MMR jab. The unanswered quiestion to me is has the MMR jab triggered a regression that would have happened anyway, or has the vaccine 'caused' autism, and it is not one that can easily be answered. I do find some of the conpspiracy theories on both sides of the debate hard to swallow though. It will be interesting to see how the case progresses. I think it will be succesful in raising awareness but I think the chances of winning are quite small. Simon Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
LizK Report post Posted January 28, 2006 The unanswered quiestion to me is has the MMR jab triggered a regression that would have happened anyway, or has the vaccine 'caused' autism, and it is not one that can easily be answered. I do find some of the conpspiracy theories on both sides of the debate hard to swallow though. I've wondered that one too whether the MMR has triggered something that would have happened later or made a milder autistic tendency more apparent. Such a theory would fit in with both the epidemiological studies that prove no link (because the children would have gone onto develop ASD at some point anyway) but also back up the anecdotal stories of parents whose children developed signs of ASD with days of having the jab. As far as I know there has been no research looking at this particular aspect Liz x Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
sue1957 Report post Posted January 29, 2006 I'm not intending to be controversial but I don't think MMR (or mercury) are the only considerations. Apart from any mercury/MMR issue, there's also the fillers. There's a list of some potential ones at http://www.mercola.com/2001/mar/7/vaccine_ingredients.htm Vaccination has an effect on the adrenal glands, which if they are overwhelmed can result in decreased ability to cope with stress. It may be a factor in why some people are convinced that MMR caused autism in their child, rather than just the MMR itself. But what about the possibility that ANY vaccination could trigger it in susceptible children? It could be the challenge of MMR on the adrenal glands, (or even several challenges from single jabs, which apart from more shocks to the adrenal glands, introduce more fillers). So apart from the vaccine itself, the fillers, there's the condition of the adrenal glands at the time of vaccination, (perhaps connected to genetics, stress in the womb, birth complications etc) and what other stressors follow vaccination. For instance might there be an allergic/immune/stress response to a substance that is ingested or absorbed every day from food and toiletries etc, for which the body might have been ?primed? by a vaccine filler? An example is that formaldehyde has been used as a vaccine filler, and is found in some toiletries, including children's bubble baths. Maybe the research parameters need to be widened? Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
call me jaded Report post Posted January 29, 2006 I think the most interesting thing that came out of that piece of research by Wakefield was that the MMR vaccine strain of measles was found in the spinal fluid and therefore the brain. It's a shame that so much public research money has been spent on epidemiology which will never show up a subset of a subset of the population, rather than something that will help. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Lucas Report post Posted January 30, 2006 Problem with that Measles in the spinal fluid thing; Wakefield was unable to prove it wasn't a false positive caused by cross-contamination. Plenty other people have looked at the same guts and samples as Wakefield and come to very different conclusions from him. My own opinion remains the same: vaccines cannot make a Neurotypical into an Autistic, but there is a case that Autistics are sensitive to them and the subsequent response is misread as the 'normal' child becoming Autistic after a jab. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
call me jaded Report post Posted January 30, 2006 Yes a lot of money has been wasted going over that original Wakefield research: his study was not designed to be definitive. Vijay Singh's work on autism, MMR and auto-immunity makes interesting reading. I think the Wakefield debacle set back research by at least 10 years, shamefully. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites