[Suave]

While the MMR-autism link has been thoroughly discredited, Dr. Wakefield and his allies continue to sow seeds of doubt about the safety of childhood vaccines with selective use of data and elaborate conspiracy theories.

“As a result, a generation of parents and their children have grown up afraid of vaccines and resulting outbreaks of measles and mumps have damaged and destroyed young lives,” Dr. Gregory Poland of the Mayo Clinic’s Vaccine Research Group in Rochester, Minn., wrote in Thursday’s edition of the New England Journal of Medicine.

The damage has been most extensive in Britain and Ireland, where MMR vaccination rates fell below 80 per cent. In Ireland, an outbreak of measles – a disease that has essentially been eradicated by immunization – led to more than 100 children being hospitalized and three deaths.

Once common childhood diseases and their sometimes tragic consequences – mental ######ation caused by measles, children left deaf by the mumps, blinded by rubella, pneumonia caused by Hib (Haemophilus influenzae bacterium), the crippling effects of polio, to name only a few – are now largely invisible.

With horrors out of sight, benefits are out of mind. Instead, there is an almost obsessive focus on side effects – and, yes, vaccines, like all drugs, can have side effects

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/...rticle1867998/