WOW! Sleeper of a story...
From
Mysanthropyst comes a link to an article in the
Sydney Morning Herald that points to an article in the Brit. Medical Journal "The Lancet":
bq.
Journal repents over vaccine-autism link
One of the world's pre-eminent medical journals, the British magazine The Lancet, has said that it should never have published a 1998 study into controversial research linking a triple vaccine for infants to autism due to the researcher's "fatal conflict of interest".
bq. The journal's editor said at the weekend that the British physician who conducted a controversial study linking the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine to autism should have revealed that he was gathering information for a lawyer representing parents who believed that their children had been harmed by the vaccine.
bq. Fears over the single-dose vaccine - used in Britain since 1988 and in the United States for more than 30 years - led to a steep drop in the number of British children being vaccinated, which has been blamed for outbreaks of measles in various parts of the country.
About the researcher (a Dr. Wakefield):
bq. "In my view, if we had known the conflict of interest Dr Wakefield had in this work, I think that would have strongly affected the peer reviewers about the credibility of this work, and in my judgement it would have been rejected."
This is the whole flap about Thimerosol and mercury and all that good (bad) stuff...
Posted by DaveH at February 22, 2004 9:47 PM