There is nothing that a research scientist less wants to do than publicly repudiate his or her work, except maybe cause little babies to be born in the condition that I described to you yesterday. It took major guts for them to come out and say what they did. Even so, the hysteria the study caused did not end. The article I am quoting from goes on to note that :"MMR uptake has fallen as low as 60% in some areas, is leaving British children vulnerable to disease." What to do to calm the public's fears, then? The original scientists couldn't do it. Perhaps another study? Many, actually. All over the world. The British medical journal the Lancet, where the controversy first started, has published the results of a follow up study. And guess what? Here is what the Doctor leading that study had to say: Dr Liam Smeeth and his colleagues from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine were unable to find any evidence to support an association between the triple measles, mumps and rubella vaccine and autism or other PDDs.Overall, 78% of the children with autism or a PDD had received MMR. Similarly, 82% of the other children had been given MMR..This 4% difference was not significant, said Dr Smeeth. Again, no difference was found when they looked specifically at autism, children vaccinated with MMR before their third birthday or the period before 1998 when controversy around the vaccine hit. Dr Smeeth said: "We have found no convincing evidence that MMR vaccination increases the risk of autism or other PDDs. "No significant association has been found in rigorous studies in a range of different settings." He said research was now needed to try to pin down the real causes of autism." <http://search.netscape.com/ns/boomframe.jsp?query=bbc+news&page=1&offset=1&resu lt_url=redir%3Fsrc%3Dwebsearch%26requestId%3D45e8a44c6134edee%26clickedItemRank% 3D1%26userQuery%3Dbbc%2Bnews%26clickedItemURN%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fnews.bbc.co.u k%252F%26invocationType%3D-%26fromPage%3DnsBrowserRoll%26amp%3BampTest%3D1&remov e_url=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.bbc.co.uk%2F> Will *this* calm fears? No. Because fear is not logical. It doesn't respond to reason. I predict that my pointing this information out to you will have no effect on your opinion regarding the causes of autism. You will continue to cite the causal relationship as a fact, despite now *knowing* that it is a discredited theory in the scientific community, despite now *knowing* that the people who discovered the relationship in the first place admit that they made a mistake. You will continue to take bad science, and urge others to make bad choices with it. You will back your assertions up with a handfull of short term studies without double-blind controls, and call them 'proof', too, apparently without understanding what the level of scientific proof actually is. Bad science, bad choices. The bad response to these studies is, of course, "well, the doctors just don't take into account any bad reactions caused by the vaccine." No, they are only interested in eliminating autism as one of those bad reactions. Any scientific experiment can only prove or disprove *one* hypothesis at a time. Once *one* question is answered, then others can be addressed one at a time. This is good science, it is not "ignoring evidence', it is not some vast, right-wing conspiracy. Many questions remain to be answered about autism, and about vaccines. But thanks to the research of many scientists around the world, "Does the MMR cause autism?" isn't one of them. I have given you cumbersome BBC links. If you Google "Autism and measles, mumps, and rubella" you will get the second of the two articles I have cited, also many other related links arguing both sides of the issue. Alexandra in MA [Posted in FML issue 4649]