When it comes to vaccinations, misinformation can kill. Find out the truth as we look at vaccination myths, including the mercury fear and autism claims.

ON the surface, Professor Guy Eslick is the last person youd expect to be driving a stake into the anti-immunisation lobby.

Not so long ago, he was distraught to receive the call any parent dreads: his daughter’s preschool telling him she was unconscious after suffering a febrile convulsion following her childhood vaccinations.

Reliving his daughter’s health crisis of three years ago, Prof Eslick says he was frightened.

“She had a fit at preschool, her eyes rolled back into her head and she was totally out of it,” he says.

“She was unconscious for 10 hours and spent a number of days in hospital and as a parent I was extremely worried.”

Just two weeks later, Eslick’s two year old son had a febrile seizure in reaction to his vaccinations, and was also taken to hospital.

Even though his own children have experienced some of the worst possible vaccine side effects, Eslick this week produced research that further strengthened the case for immunisation by debunking the claim vaccines cause autism.

He says the health scares did not stop him vaccinating all three of his children.

“It’s not to say it is not scary,” he explains.

“It’s a (rare) reaction that can occur as your body initiates an immune response, and the fever can sometimes spike rapidly, and some kids are prone to convulsions.”

Instead of shying off immunisation the Sydney University epidemiologist wants to encourage other parents to vaccinate their kids by repudiating one of the key scare campaigns of the anti-immunisation lobby.

The claim vaccination is linked to autism has been one of the key tenets of anti-immunisation campaigners and the Australian Vaccination Sceptics Network lists what it claims are 68 “studies supporting vaccine/autism causation” on its website.

Last month the NSW Health Care Complaints Commission slammed the AVN website’s claim the studies showed vaccination “caused” autism.

It called on the AVN to correct the misinformation because it “engenders fear and alarm and is likely to detrimentally affect the clinical management or care of its readers”.

“The studies mostly describe an association between autism or other neurological disorders with vaccines or other environmental exposures, but they make no claim of causality,” the commission said.

The genesis of the claimed vaccine/autism link was research published in the prestigious Lancet medical journal in 1998 by gastroenterologist Dr Andrew Wakefield. He claimed to have found that the Measles Mumps Rubella (MMR) vaccination caused intestinal inflammation and the consequent development of autism.

After a series of investigations found the research had been fabricated and that Wakefield had received undeclared payments in 2010, Britain’s General Medical Council struck him off the medical register barring him from working as a doctor in the UK. The Lancet also retracted his 1998 article on the basis of “falsified results”.

Wakefield’s study involved just 12 children with neurodevelopmental delay, including eight with autism. Even though the small study was immediately heavily criticised, many scared parents stopped vaccinating their children and immunisation rates in the UK plunged from 92 per cent of all children to just 73 per cent.

Many children caught these serious childhood illnesses, and some died.

In Australia, where government family payments were tied to immunisation status, vaccinations rates did not drop and in 2008 doctors declared we had eliminated measles.

But there are still pockets of low immunisation in Australia and there have been recent outbreaks of measles.

While immunisation rates continue to improve and nationwide stood at 91.5 per cent for five year olds last year, there were still 75,000 children who were not fully vaccinated. The parents of 15,000 of these children had actively signed a conscientious objection form to vaccination.

Parents in some postcodes, including Manly (80.4 per cent), South Yarra (82.9 per cent), Noosa Heads (83.1 per cent) and Beaumont (81.7 per cent) in South Australia are failing to vaccinate their kids.

The Mullumbimby postcode of 2482 in NSW has fewer than 47 per cent of its five year olds children fully vaccinated.

In 2012 there was a measles outbreak in Western Sydney with 173 cases and in the year to November 2013 there were a further 112 cases that threatened out measles elimination.

In the years following the Lancet article four subsequent studies were unable to replicate Wakefield’s findings and in fact found no difference in the incidence of autism among vaccinated or unvaccinated children.

Professor Guy Eslick says he was prompted to investigate the matter further after watching an SBS television program on vaccination last year.

“No one had bothered to pull all this stuff together,” he said.

“The aim of this research was to come up with the truth,” he said.

Eslick is not an expert in vaccines but an epidemiologist whose work involves conducting meta analyses of numerous major medical studies conducted by others around the world. He usually works on cancer research to decipher links between the disease and its causes.

The vaccine meta analysis examined 10 major studies on autism and vaccines from around the world that involved 1.25 million children and assessed the odds that children would develop autism after vaccination.

“If the odds were greater than one then vaccination had an increased risk, if the risk was less than one there was a decreased risk and if it was right on one there was no relationship,” he said.

“Most of the studies were right on one, there was just no relationship between vaccination and autism. I hope this study goes some way to closing the doors on the connection between vaccination and autism and I want people to vaccinate their children.”

Anti-vaccination campaigners, however, are not embracing the research as the final nail in the coffin for the autism link.

Greg Beattie, the head of the anti-vaccination lobby Australian Vaccination Skeptics Network, says he has not read Eslick’s research but that meta analysis research is “right up there as evidence goes”. The group’s website is still claiming vaccination causes autism and he says it is not enough to stop their campaign.

“It’s not the be all and end all, two meta analyses can have conflicting conclusions,” he says.

Sydney University Associate Professor Julie Leask, who researches parental attitudes to immunisation, welcomes Eslick’s research but says it is unlikely to make any difference to parents who don’t vaccinate their children.

“These parents mistrust government and medicine, they tend to associate efforts to promote vaccines as part of a big pharma conspiracy and governments wanting to control their citizens, they see vaccines as not natural and believe they do mysterious things to the child’s immune system,” she says.

“The parents who are not vaccinating have their child’s best interest at the forefront of their mind, unfortunately they believe they’ve got to protect their child from the vaccines not the disease.”

Thrusting research results like the autism research at these parents may simply lead to them rehearsing their arguments against immunisation and solidifying their belief, Leask says.

Too often parents who want to raise questions about immunisation feel they are dismissed and lumped into the anti-immunisation category and this reinforces their fears, she says.

“Information can be good if it is provided in the right way, in a way that is respectful, to guide parents, but it can backfire if it is used as a weapon” she says.

Professor Eslick lives in Mosman Sydney, an area where immunisation rates are lower.

“I plan to take the paper put to medical practitioners in my area, it’s about getting the message out, he says.

Greg Beattie clarification

In an earlier version of this article, news.com.au reported that Mr Greg Beattie, then head of the Australian Vaccinations-skeptics Network, described research by Professor Guy Eslick claiming to debunk the link between vaccines and autism as "right up there as evidence goes". This was incorrect. The Courier-Mail wishes to clarify that Mr Beattie's comment was made in relation to meta-analyses in general and not in relation to Professor Eslick's study.





