No. Obviously not. Saying such a thing would constitute sensationalist reporting of the crudest kind, and I'm not going to resort to that. But remember this:
No. Obviously not. Saying such a thing would constitute sensationalist reporting of the crudest kind, and I’m not going to resort to that.
But remember this:
And this:
And this:
And this:
The “evidence” reported by the Daily Mail in the above instances turned out of course to be nothing of the sort, and was completely discredited years ago.
The “stories” came after the Lancet had published a study in 1998, led by Dr Andrew Wakefield, which linked the MMR jab with autism and bowel disease.
The Lancet, which originally published the research linking autism and MMR, issued a full retraction of the paper in 2010, describing it as “false”. Dr Wakefield was later struck off from the medical register for “offences relating to dishonesty and failing to act in the best interests of vulnerable child patients”.
Three years on, however, and the consequences of the scaremongering about MMR and autism are still being felt.
This week it was reported that a measles outbreak in Swansea has reached 588 cases, with the number of those contracting measles increasing by 116 in a single week with 51 people hospitalised. Measles is a disease which can cause brain damage and death in children.
Dr Roland Salmon, a consultant epidemiologist from Public Health Wales, told the BBC that local GPs were seeing a lot of children aged between 10 and 15. He added that they would have been the babies who missed out on the vaccine following the now-discredited 1998 report linking the MMR jab and autism.
The graphs below show the rough correlation between immunisation levels and rates of measles.
And this one shows that the UK has the fifth highest proportion of measles cases in Europe.
45 Responses to “Is the Daily Mail killing children?”
synergise
Erm,
I’m sorry to hear about your son, and I’m glad he made a full recovery.
However, your son’s case does not prove that “when the measles and mumps virus are in the body at the same time, it can be very dangerous”.
Encephalitic and meningitic reactions to vaccinations are extremely rare, but do happen. However, as doctors we compare the risk of these reactions with the risk of your son contracting the diseases they protect against. In actual fact, these reactions occur at a similar- and extremely low- rate in both the combined and single vaccines.
Taking isolated incidents and extrapolating them to a countrywide or worldwide populations is exactly the method the Mail uses to create its regular scare stories, which are at best misleading or at worst- as in the case of the MMR vaccine- actually dangerous.
Again, I am glad your son made a full recovery. The experience must have been terrible for both of you.
Jon
Maybe the government thinks it should be spending finite healthcare funding on vaccinations and treatments that are actually needed, not on providing a sop to parents who are concerned enough about their child’s well-being to refuse MMR based on tabloid reports, but not concerned enough to research the issue properly, or to care that they’re exposing their child to an actually credible risk of contracting Measles.
The Government providing a separate Measles vaccine would be the equivalent of them paying to replace every paving stone in the country with tarmac, because people think its bad luck to step on the cracks. Their job is to manage limited resources according to evidence and reality, not pander to misinformed paranoia and press scaremongering.
Morgan Cox
Kill children? That’s odd, the Daily Mail normally fantasizes sexually about children – i.e writing about 8 year old ‘leggy beauties’ – http://www.themediablog.co.uk/the-media-blog/2013/01/daily-mail-turns-the-creepiness-up-a-notch.html . The paper is so sick it goes after the peado pound.
Maybe they fantasize about dead children also ?
Chris Miller
I’m fully vaccinated and nothing bad happened to me as a result. This PROVES that vaccination is perfectly safe and there are no possible bad reactions.
(Obviously not – my sister’s actually quite allergic to the tetanus vaccine, for example, suffering from a reaction that resulted in poor function and pain that spread into both arms for multiple years after getting it. But if I stood on a rusty nail I’d still want the damn injection, because I understand the difference between anecdote and scientific data.)
Stephen John Senn
For goodness sake, the Daily Mail publishes horoscopes So two possibilities: either the editorial staff believe this garbage, in which case check them in to fruit central, or they are prepared to publish stuff they don’t believe is true. Personally, I think the paper is a load of old Taurus.