Are Autism and Vaccines Linked?

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In one of my previous entries 1998 - 2008, I discussed how, for autism, the vaccine issue really began with Dr Andrew Wakefield in 1998.

Commenter 'toxouts' made a series of interesting points about this which I'd like to address.

In his (apologies if the gender is wrong)  first comment he asks us to 'look at Wakefield in context' and then suggests Wakefield is the victim of a money-led conspiracy. No facts are presented to back this up, simply an assertion that it 'must' be so.

He goes on to suggest that the 'scapegoating' of Wakefield and the lab he used (Unigenetics) is in part manufactured to help in the ongoing Autism Omnibus hearings in the US where three hypotheses are on trial:

1) that MMR causes autism
2) that thiomersal in vaccines causes autism
3) that a combination of both cause autism

The first test case was a child called Michelle Cedillo, whos parents alleged she was developing 'normally' until her MMR vaccine and then she regressed into autism. They presented video evidence during the trial (ftp://autism.uscfc.uscourts.gov/autism/cedillo.html) that they claimed demonstrated this. However, specialist autism diagnosticians testified that in fact, Michelle had been showing classic signs of autism prior to her MMR vaccination.

'toxouts' says that Michelle had 'verif[ed] vaccine-strain measles in her gut tissue'. This is untrue.

During the Cedillo case, the testimony of Professor Stephen Bustin was vital.

The autism/MMR hypotheses is (in simple terms) that the MMR vaccine is injected, travels to the gut where the measles virus component does damage of a gastric nature and then travels to the brain and causes autism. The hypotheses is that it should be possible to detect the vaccine-strain measles virus in the gut. And lo and behold, Wakefield and various others claimed they had done this.

It is also worth noting that every single piece of published evidence supporting this hypothesis went through the lab of John O'Leary's lab called Unigenetics.

Enter Stephen Bustin. Bustin is possibly the world expert on the techniques used in the O’Leary lab that were claimed led to identifying measles virus in autistic kids gut and brain. The technique is called PCR . Not only does Bustin use PCR every day, he has 14 papers in the peer reviewed literature on PCR , over 8 book chapters and is personally the author of the A to Z of Quantitative PCR . which is considered ‘the bible’ of PCR . One of his papers has been cited over 1,000 times. Another has been cited over 500 times. He both organises and speaks at international PCR conferences.

Bustin spent over 1500 hours in the O'Leary lab (now closed). I wrote about the evidence he gave last year (http://leftbrainrightbrain.co.uk/?p=566) but to sum up:

"What I immediately observed was that they had forgotten to do the RT step"

No RT step means it’s DNA being detected. Measles virus does not exist as a DNA molecule. That’s simple medical fact. Bustin concluded:

"So all of this evidence suggests very, very strongly that what they are detecting is DNA and not RNA . Because measles virus doesn’t exist as a DNA molecule in nature, they cannot be detecting measles virus RNA . They are detecting a contaminant. All of the additional evidence, from the nonreproducibility by Professor Cotter of the same samples that Unigenetics analyzed to the analysis of the data where there are discordant positives, where the negatives came up positive, suggests very, very strongly to me that there is a lot of contamination in the laboratory, which is not unusual, but they have not handled it very well in how they have troubleshot their problems. So I have very little doubt that what they are detecting is a DNA contaminant and not measles virus, and I do not believe there is any measles virus in any of the cases they have looked at."

Considering that every single piece of published science that claimed to find vaccine strain measles virus in autistic kids had gone through O'Leary's lab, the fact that a world renowned expert in the technique O'learys lab were (wrongly) implementing found that it simply wasn't possible that they had been detecting measles virus, means this was (and is) a virtual stake through the heart of the MMR hypothesis

'toxouts' also claims that the Afzal and D'Souza papers are not reliable refutations of the measles virus hypothesis as they looked in peripheral blood instead of gastrointestinal tissue samples. That shows a lack of understanding as to the medical nature of measles virus. I'll again quote Stephen Bustin:

"...if you’ve got that much measles virus in a gut sample it probably is in other cells as well and you should be able to detect it, for example, in blood."

In short, there's no reason to suppose measles virus thats supposedly in the gut in the amounts that Wakefield et al claimed to be finding it at would not be in the blood too.

'toxouts' then goes on to mention lots of other things he suspects are related to MMR which have absolutely nothing to do with the scientific question: do vaccines cause autism?

He closes with this:

"I challenge anyone to ......rationally argue that mercury, at any level in the body, by any route -- including injection -- is okay."

This is patently a silly thing to say as Mercury is naturally occuring in the soil, fossil fuels and the ocean to name but three (http://www.mercuryanswers.org/). By 'toxouts' logica we would all be autistic or whatever one of the myriad illnesses he suspects vaccines cause. It should also be noted that mercury was never in the MMR vaccine.