A new study that was released by researchers from the University of Michigan and published in the journal Pediatrics this week revealed some bittersweet news about parents’ attitudes toward vaccinating their children. While the survey of 1,552 parents found that one in four U.S. parents believes some vaccines cause autism in healthy children, the study also found that most parents continue to follow the advice of their children’s doctors, with nine out of ten saying that they parents believe that vaccination is a good way to prevent diseases for their children.
The information from this survey tells me that public education campaigns conducted by organizations such as Every Child By Two and many others (click here for a list) fill a critical role in conveying scientific information to the public. It’s only natural that parents will have questions about their children’s health, but it’s up to the public health community to answer them in a clear and comprehensive way. As lead author of the study Dr. Gary Freed says, most of parents’ fears are unfounded, so it’s essential that “physicians … take parental concerns seriously. They need to be aware of and familiar with the data on the safety of vaccines, because parents deserve to have concrete info on vaccine safety.”
Doctor-patient communication is critical, and the American Academy of Pediatrics, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) partnered to develop some great resources for providers to communicate with parents about vaccine concerns. Click here to check it out.
In order to better prepare parents prior to their child’s vaccines, I’d like everyone to share with their friends and family some credible resources to which parents can turn to have some of their tough questions answered. For example, Every Child By Two posed some frequently asked questions to several experts in the fields of immunization and autism and recorded the expert answers here.
Another item that concerned me was that parents believe that newer vaccines are untested, and less safe than ones that have been around longer. I want to reiterate that all vaccines go through the same, very stringent and lengthy, regulatory review process. Because vaccines are given to healthy individuals, they undergo a more rigorous approval process than drugs which are given to cure sick people. Vaccines are also tested in combination with one another so that they are proven to be safe in the context of the CDC schedule as well. Licensing of vaccines typically takes 15 years and an average of $800 million of manufacturers’ money. For more info on this process, click here, or visit the FDA web site.
Finally, the study also pointed out that although Hispanic families have the lowest rate of vaccine refusal as compared to white or black individuals, they were more likely to believe that some vaccines cause autism. The researchers suggested that “addressing this concern explicitly before it has an impact on immunization rates should be strongly considered by both public health officials and private providers in these communities.”
I hope that you will share this information with any concerned parents out there who may not have had all of their questions answered!
Lynn Bozof is one of five founding members of the National Meningitis Association.
It’s great news that there is now a second vaccine licensed for meningococcal meningitis. Unfortunately, I know from personal experience that meningococcal meningitis is a killer disease. I lost my 20 year old son, Evan, to meningitis, not knowing that his life could have been saved by a vaccine. Evan had all the vaccines that were recommended before he started college, but no one told us about meningitis. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now recommends routine vaccination for all 11-18 year olds and for college freshmen living in dorms, at the earliest possible opportunity. I never thought that tragedy would strike my family, but it did. I will never get over the loss of my son, and I don’t want others to suffer the same tragedy, as there is a safe, effective vaccine available. Please visit the National Meningitis Association Web site, www.nmaus.org for more information.
It seems like we’ve been hearing less about H1N1 recently, but it’s important to be mindful of the uncertainty of this virus, and to continue to protect ourselves through vaccination. Experts are not willing to close the book on H1N1 just yet. According to today’s Washington Post, “Influenza transmission waxes and wanes, and outbreaks of novel pandemic strains occur in particularly unpredictable waves that depend on such variables as human behavior, atmospheric conditions and even competition from other microbes. That places them among the bigger mysteries of epidemiology, the science of disease outbreaks.”
The Posts David Brownexplains that, “ The ‘Spanish flu’ of 1918 had four waves of greatly differing deadliness, spread over two years. The “Asian flu” of 1957, like the current H1N1 strain, had a late-spring and a fall wave — followed by a third in late winter of 1958. It then took a year off before peaking again in 1960. The ‘Hong Kong flu’ of 1968 had more than a year hiatus between its two waves, with the second infecting nearly as many people as the first.”
Check out this video “Momversation” of parents reacting to the recent Lancet retraction. Mommy blogger Daphne Brogdon of Cool Mom gathers some of her fellow parenting bloggers and asks to answer the following questions: Do parents like Jenny MCarthy still insist that the MMR vaccine caused their children’s disorder? Is this the final word on the vaccine-autism link? Or will people cling to the idea that vaccines can cause autism?
Check out the following items from our friends at Families Fighting Flu. They have some excellent resources to offer!
Participate in the Families Fighting Flu Survey!
FFF created an online survey to help gauge parents’ behaviors and attitudes about flu vaccination this flu season in comparison to previous non-pandemic seasons. By completing the survey, parents of children aged 6 months to 18 years will have the opportunity to win a $250 American Express gift card. One winner will be randomly selected and notified via e-mail by March 31, 2010. We encourage you to participate and spread the news to all eligible parents! The survey is available here from February 18 through March 12. We look forward to sharing the results.
Families Fighting Flu: A Guide For Parents
For important information about influenza, check out the blog Families Fighting Flu: A Guide for Parents by Jon Abramson, M.D. and his daughter Rebecca. Dr. Abramson, a medical advisor and ex-officio board member of FFF has been working in the area of influenza since 1981. Dr. Abramson and his daughter created this blog to educate parents and address some of the misinformation about the flu and flu vaccination.
Did you know that three human influenza pandemics occurred in the 20th century, each resulting in illness in approximately 20 to 30 percent of the world population? You can read more about pandemics in the latest chapter, Pandemic Influenza Due to the 2009 Novel H1N1 Virus.
Check out this video from Morning Joe which aired this morning. Co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski had Chris Mooney, author of Unscientific America, and NBC’s Dr. Nancy Snyderman on the show this morning to discuss vaccines and the Lancet retraction. Both Dr. Snyderman and Mr. Mooney talked about scientific illiteracy in America, and the need to move past the vaccine and autism debate, especially since the Wakefield study has been expunged from the scientific record. When asked about whether there were any studies that suggested a link between vaccines and autism Dr. Snyderman unequivocally stated “no.”
Journalist Michael Fumento’s opinion piece in today’s LA Times touches on the ramifications of the 1998 Wakefield study, which was retracted this week by the original publisher, The Lancet. Fumento writes, “Never mind that by 2008, more than 20 articles published in peer-reviewed medical journals found no connection between MMR vaccine and autism…There’s also a mountain of reassuring evidence regarding thimerosal-preserved vaccines.” Wakefield’s study, for which he has been reprimanded by the General Medical Council, “set us back a decade, and we’re just recovering from that” according to Mark Sawyer, San Diego-based pediatrician and infectious disease specialist interviewed for the article.
Fumento highlights the fact that some anti-vaccine groups, such as the National Vaccine Information Center, who oppose mandatory vaccines disregard the importance of ensuring herd immunity to protect the unvaccinated. Fumento interviewed ECBT Spokesperson Danielle Romaguera, whose baby died of whooping cough. Romaguera asks the public to be aware that their decisions affect other people’s children and diseases do still exist, and can kill.
I encourage everyone to check out the msnbc.com article by Dr. Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, “How a zealot’s word led us astray on autism.”
Excerpt: ‘The [Lancet] language was probably not strong enough. The Wakefield paper killed children and left others deaf and disabled from preventable diseases as their parents, in an effort to avoid autism, left them unvaccinated.”
Dr. Caplan, I applaud you, because I completely concur that the Lancet has not done nearly enough to rectify the damage that has been done to the credibility of vaccines worldwide in major part due to their irresponsible decision to print the “research” conducted by Andrew Wakefield. It doesn’t take a degree in metaphysics to recognize that the outcome of a study consisting of a handful of subjects perhaps does not represent the larger population. And that was only one in the many, many faults of the Wakefield study, which has never been replicated, try as several researchers might.
Don’t miss this piece, it may be my favorite of the decade!
Alison Singer, co-founder and president of the Autism Science Foundation, has written an opinion piece for CNN describing how the Wakefield study, and later the disrepute of the study, has impacted her life as a mother of a child with autism and as an advocate for autistic children. Singer explains that when her daughter Jodie was diagnosed with autism, she, like many other scared parents at the time, decided to break up her second daughter’s vaccinations. After reading the study carefully and realizing Dr. Wakefield’s many conflicts of interest, Singer re-evaluated her stance. She realized that not only did her decision leave her daughter vulnerable to disease, but also that the discredited vaccine issue was taking much needed research funding and attention away from finding the true causes of autism. Singer now runs the Autism Science Foundation, a group whose mission it is to support legitimate autism research by providing funding and other assistance to scientists and organizations conducting, facilitating, publicizing and disseminating scientifically sound autism research. As you can imagine, Singer is glad that Wakefield’s research has been formally discredited. However, the consequences of this ordeal have yielded devastating results. Singer wrote on CNN.com, “Once you put a scary idea in someone’s head, it is very hard to reassure them, even in the presence of compelling science. Anti-vaccine autism activists continue to view Wakefield as a hero willing to take on the establishment and fight for their children. In the meantime, his research has had a lasting negative effect on children’s health in that some people are still afraid of immunizations. In some cases, the younger siblings of children with autism are being denied lifesaving vaccines, despite mountains of scientific evidence indicating no link between vaccines and autism. This is the Wakefield legacy.” Please click here to read Alison’s full piece on CNN.com, which also includes very promising findings in the field of autism research.
[Ed. note: this just ran in the New York Times Motherlode Blog. An amazing piece on the recent decision by the GMC on Dr. Andrew Wakefield, the infamous doctor who published a 1998 study in the Lancet suggesting that the MMR vaccine caused autism. His study, which was later discredited, has led many parents to falsely believe the MMR vaccine may be dangerous and refuse it for their kids.]
When Dr. Andrew Wakefield — the British doctor who linked vaccines to autism — was found to be “dishonest,” “irresponsible” and acting “contrary to the clinical interests” of a child by a medical misconduct panel last week, it was the latest controversial moment in the medical mystery that is autism.
