Ignore the fear, get the vaccines

Friday, April 11, 2008 8:44 PM CDT

It should be a no-brainer, should be but isn’t, this business of being vaccinated against disease. Yes many people do it, and yes it’s advice preached regularly by doctors and public health workers.

Yet every time some vaccine-preventable disease flares up, it’s almost guaranteed that the anti-vaccine voices will be heard.

They appeared again last week on local TV newscasts in conjunction with a story about Milwaukee area people who contracted measles. It’s a rare disease now, thanks to the progress in vaccinating most of the population, but here again were people voicing their distrust of vaccines and linking them to a greater risk of autism even though the evidence is fully against them and has been.

There were no measles cases in Racine as of Friday, but there were four in greater Milwaukee: three in an infant and two toddlers who attended the same suburban day care center, and the fourth in a 37-year-old Milwaukee man. And out came the people who believe that vaccines cause autism in children after a newscaster intoned that there is a “growing movement” to abandon childhood vaccinations, and of course there’s an appearance by a physician who advocates vaccination.

The autism fear centers on thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative used in many children’s vaccines about a decade ago and now found in only four — one for diphtheria and pertussis and three for influenza. Time and again studies have found no link between thimerosal and autism.

One of the recent reports came out in January in the Archives of General Psychiatry. The authors looked at information from California and found that from 1995 to 2007 the incidence of autism in children continually increased (to about 4 per 1,000 children) despite the removal of even trace amounts of thimerosal from vaccines.

There are risks with vaccines just as with any medicine, but for the vast majority of people the benefits of vaccines far outweigh the risks. By focusing the unproven link to autism, we look at only the recent past. We have forgotten the lessons of our parents’ and grandparents’ generations.

We have forgotten that polio put President Franklin D. Roosevelt in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the waist down, from age 39 until the end of his life 24 years later.

One can sympathize with people who want answers to the autism puzzle, but playing up unproven fears about vaccinations is not the answer. It’s dangerous for the children left with minimal protection against diseases such as measles, and dangerous for the other people to whom they may transmit disease, which with the ease of global travel pretty much means the rest of the planet.

Special Offer: Get 5 Weeks of the Journal Times for $7!