"Faith" in the MMR Vaccine

A recent report in the JEP shows that parents in Jersey now have more faith in the MMR vaccine. I'd have more faith if I knew that:

a) adverse reactions were properly notified, the general health visitor response to raised temperature is to give calpol. No record is kept of such adverse reactions; it is just a verbal communication, lost to the system.

b) parents were given details of the batch numbers of the MMR vaccines. The record keeping back in the 1990s was certainly extremely sloppy, and if a parent wanted the details, they might actually be inaccurate, i.e., not tally with the vaccine manufacturers own details. I've never seen a health visitor note down the number, so this is hardly surprising.

Given this lack of data, it beggars belief that reports - based on statistical analysis of adverse reactions, and vaccines - can be trusted. If there is a rogue batch, how could it be tracked, given that there is no tracking, no policy on adverse side effects recording at all. "Faith" in this respect, seems more akin to the kind of religious belief lambasted by Richard Dawkins - such "faith" is powerful enough to immunize people against rationality.

Look at how different the situation is with the CHAT - the childhood autism "early warning" tests devised by Simon Baron-Cohen; if this flags up a warning, the child's development is monitored, and periodically reviewed. Nothing like that happens with vaccines, and adverse reactions, and the logic is that it is safe, and not required.

Incidentally, a recent report on the USA 2006 outbreak of mumps reveals that the vaccine does not necessarily confer much immunity - 63% coming down with mumps having had two MMR jabs. And because it has been bound up - for largely political and economic reasons in the USA, Canada, the UK, and Jersey (but not France, for example) - there is no single mumps only vaccine available to give a third "booster". Which leaves the health authorities in a quandary. Faith the MMR, it seems, may not give immunity after all.

Some of the scientists adopt the question begging approach, saying the situation would have been larger if the vaccine had not been given, or the outbreak more severe, but as there is no control group, that is pure speculation - especially as no reports have been made of more severe outbreaks among those who had not had the two MMR jabs, which surely would provide some degree of control group evidence. But surprisingly, no such detailed reports have surfaced, which is strange, if the hypothesis was more than rhetoric of people who simply didn't know why the vaccine had failed so spectacularly, and wanted to bolster the public's continual "faith" in the MMR vaccine.

"Faith", says Dawkins, "means. blind trust, in the absence of evidence, even. in the teeth of evidence"

Do you have "faith" in the MMR?

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Jersey shows faith in MMR vaccine

Diane Simon

MORE parents in the Island have greater confidence in the MMR vaccine for their children, according to recently released statistics.

The uptake in Jersey of the vaccine against measles, mumps and rubella now stands at 86 per cent of those who are eligible to take it compared to 73 per cent in 2005.

Immunisation nurse specialist Linda Diggle said that the increase was mostly due to the effort that Health, GPs, school nurses and health visitors had made in answering parents' questions about the vaccine.

'Predominantly, parents in Jersey have shaken off the adverse publicity about the MMR vaccine in the last few years,' she said. 'The evidence is very strong that this vaccine is safe and the best way to protect children from these diseases.'

JEP Published 1/5/2008

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http://canadianpress.google.com/article/ALeqM5jho73tvnoJ4y5V2ZCfimTXdmyvxg

A new U.S. study suggests the timing of the delivery of mumps vaccine or the number of shots given might need to be tweaked to avert or control future outbreaks of the disease.

The study, a report on a large mumps outbreak in the U.S. Midwest in 2006, revealed that 63 per cent of the people who came down with mumps had received the recommended two doses of mumps vaccine in childhood. That suggests waning immunity played a role in the outbreak.

But trying to shore up immunity to mumps into adulthood by delaying delivery of the second dose of mumps vaccine is not something immunization advisory bodies would opt for without more research and more evidence of need, the senior author of the study said in an interview.

That's because mumps vaccine comes mixed in a vaccine cocktail that also protects against measles and rubella, two diseases public health authorities view with more concern.

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http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Germs/story?id=4620377&page=1

But she did not contract and spread the disease due to her failure to receive proper immunizations. Indeed, like many of the other students on her campus who contracted the disease, she received the two-dose measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine when she was a child.

Now, new research suggests that the mumps outbreak that began early in 2006 — the largest outbreak of mumps in the United States in two decades — was probably due more to vaccine failure than the failure of people to get their recommended immunizations.

Researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention looked at mumps cases in the United States in 2006. They studied the 6,584 reported cases of mumps and found that in most cases, the vaccine from childhood no longer provided enough protection in adulthood.