Protecting our valuable vaccine programs

Benjamin Franklin championed vaccinations in the early years of our nation. In the past half century or so, widespread vaccination programs have wiped out or severely reduced the scourge of childhood diseases that afflicted or threatened most of us back in mid-century. Measles, chicken pox, and whooping cough used to be common (I certainly had all three), and polio was a fearsome threat that we could only hope didn't strike anywhere near us. All of that has changed. The success of near-universal immunizations of infants and children has rightly been called the greatest public health achievement in the United States in the twentieth century.

But all that is under attack in some quarters by concerns fueled by bad science and misinformation, and worse, some intentional distortions. While public support for vaccination programs remains at greater than 94 percent, some parents and a tiny fringe of doctors, aided by uncritical media reporting and some out-and-out fear-mongering, have mounted a campaign against vaccinations.

As physician and Yale neurology professor Steven Novella points out in this issue, an increasingly vocal anti-vaccination movement that blames the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine (MMR) for the rise in diagnoses of autism has merged with those who claim that mercury in vaccines, and in the environment, is the cause of an alleged autism epidemic and a host of other ills that plague mankind. We can all understand how anguished parents of an autism-afflicted child would want an external cause to blame. All the more reason to be wary of false cause-effect assertions.

The issue is not academic. The Autism Omnibus, a special U.S. Court of Federal Claims, heard testimony from nine families with members afflicted with autism in June. These are the first test cases among 4,800 other claims for compensation for alleged injuries from childhood vaccines. The court's decision will come early next year. The stakes are high. If the petitioners win, despite the overwhelming scientific evidence that vaccines and autism are not related, vaccination programs around the world could be seriously undermined, ft appears to be another conflict between good science and understandable, but misguided, emotion.

In this special issue, Novella joins physician Richard Judelsohn and anthropologist and author Roy Richard Grinker (in an interview with Ben Radford) in examining and dispelling the claims that vaccines and autism are related. Fourteen epidemiologic studies have been carried out, and all show no relationship between rates of autism and frequency of use of the MMR vaccine. The Institute of Medicine has reviewed all the MMR-autism data, declared there is no association, and closed the case. The authors also make clear that the so-called "epidemic" of autism is only an apparent one, resulting from better diagnoses. Actual cases of autism appear to be static. Grinker's look at the situation in other cultures reinforces those conclusions.

If you want an amusing look at some classic pseudoscience, check out Harriett Hall's article "Masaru Emoto's Wonderful World of Water." In Emoto's weird world, he can talk to water and it responds. Just about any bizarre idea you've heard about he ascribes to water. Physician Hall, in her sixth SI article, uses her light touch to evaporate his pretensions and expose his "feel-good platitudes" and "rationalized irrationality."

COPYRIGHT 2007 Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning