Parents must have choice on vaccines
‘The voluntary approach has ensured high levels of protection for British children’
In response to outbreaks of measles in France and Italy, resulting from a growing trend for parents to refuse vaccinations for their children, authorities have announced plans to make childhood immunisation compulsory. Last week, a newspaper editorial demanded similar measures in Britain.
Though I have been actively involved over the past decade in promoting the MMR vaccine in the face of claims of autism links, I hope British authorities will continue to resist calls for compulsion.
As the father of a child with autism and who was also a GP administering vaccinations to babies, I read with great interest Andrew Wakefield’s now notorious 1998 study in the The Lancet suggesting a link between MMR and autism. It was obvious that, though it presented no evidence, it would cause undue alarm.
In response I wrote the first of a series of articles, culminating in 2004 in a book MMR and Autism: What Parents Need To Know. This book sought to reassure parents that they had no grounds to fear that MMR had caused their children’s autism, and that it offered effective protection against serious diseases. It was a great relief when Wakefield’s work was exposed as fraudulent, and he departed Britain to join a wacky fringe of conspiracy theorists and alternative health cranks in the US.
When rates of uptake of the MMR vaccine fell sharply in the early 2000s, British authorities resisted calls for coercion in favour of countering propaganda and discreetly ensuring health workers were well informed about vaccine safety. They also made concerted efforts to improve immunisation levels in inner-city areas and among communities with low uptake rates. This approach has successfully raised MMR uptake to levels higher than before the Wakefield scare.
Now that the anti-vax cause has been endorsed by populist politicians such as Donald Trump and Italy’s Beppe Grillo, the demand for a coercive response is driven by political rather than by public health considerations. There are both pragmatic and principled grounds for opposing compulsion. A voluntary approach has ensured high levels of protection for British children despite various scares and ill-informed campaigns. The autonomy of individuals – and parents – in making decisions about their families’ welfare is the best guarantee of the health of society.
Return of cholera
On a recent return to my home city of Sheffield, I climbed the steep hill behind the railway station to visit the neo-gothic pinnacle that commemorates 402 victims of the 1832 cholera outbreak who are buried nearby. King cholera killed thousands in successive pandemics during the 19th century. It was not until the 1850s that the mode of transmission was discovered, when the London physician John Snow identified the source of an outbreak in Soho as contaminated water drawn from the Broad Street pump.
It is shocking to read of major outbreaks of cholera in recent months in Yemen, Somalia and South Sudan. War and the consequent disruption of sanitation and health services have resulted in the return of this preventable and treatable disease. As in 19th-century England, most deaths are among the poor and children. It is, however, interesting to note that one of the victims of the 1832 outbreak in Sheffield was John Blake, the Master Cutler – a potent reminder that when epidemics erupt nobody is safe.
Food fads debunked
At last – a serious challenge to dietary quackery and the dogmas of “healthy eating”. In Anthony Warner’s The Angry Chef: Bad Science and the Truth about Healthy Eating, the eponymous chef – who also has a degree in biochemistry – systematically debunks the pseudoscience of “clean eating”, “superfoods” and “detox” diets.
Warner provides a history of fashionable dietary treatments, from the 17th-century “doctrine of signatures”, according to which foods offered visual clues to their powers, to the alkaline and caveman diets and Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop.
He confirms there is no such thing as a healthy diet. Humans have survived and thrived on a vast range of foods. Whatever they are eating today, it is evident people are living longer and healthier lives than ever before. If the Angry Chef is as good in the kitchen as he is on the page, I’ll have whatever he’s cooking.
Dr James Le Fanu is away