'Dishonest' vaccination study revoked

Research that linked the measles vaccine with autism has been retracted and doctors hope parents will now be more confident about inoculating their children.

Prestigious British medical journal The Lancet has retracted the research after British scientist Andrew Wakefield was formally censured for a study that was "irresponsible and dishonest".

Dr Wakefield's 1998 research that claimed the MMR vaccine, which is given free to Kiwi children when they are 15 months old and again when they are 11, was linked to autism prompted panic in parents and caused vaccinations to plummet internationally.

In New Zealand, the measles vaccine uptake is one of the lowest in the OECD.

"We're pretty sure this [research] has significantly affected our uptake," Nikki Turner of the Immunisation Advisory Centre said. "We think it really affected confidence in all vaccines, not just MMR."

The centre received frequent calls from parents worried about MMR causing autism in their children, Dr Turner said. "It's heart- breaking. You just can't dispel the myth, it just doesn't go away."

The British General Medical Council censured Dr Wakefield last week, saying he had acted unethically in the way he collected blood samples from children and shown a callous disregard for the suffering of the children he studied.

The Lancet made the rare move of retracting the research.

"It has become clear that several elements of the 1998 paper by Wakefield ... are incorrect," The Lancet said.

Measles can lead to ear infections and pneumonia and a small percentage of patients suffer serious brain damage from swelling of the brain. The disease is so infectious, doctors estimate every sick person infects 13 others.

Between 80 per cent and 85 per cent of schoolchildren and just 76 per cent of two-year-olds are vaccinated for measles, mumps and rubella, delivered in the one MMR shot.

Last year the cases of measles rose 20-fold, with 259 people infected with the disease. There were just 12 cases in 2008.

In 1991, 7000 New Zealanders become ill with measles and seven children died.

Dr Turner said it would take a 95 per cent uptake of the vaccination to rid the community of the disease.

"It's not a mild disease," she said. "We still have people in our community with brain damage from measles. Yet we're not fearful of the disease, we're fearful of the vaccine."

- © Fairfax NZ News