THE HSE has said it hopes the retraction of a flawed study linking the MMR vaccine with autism will result in an increase in vaccination rates.
The comments come after prestigious medical journal, The Lancet, yesterday retracted from the public record a controversial research paper which linked the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine with autism. The paper had resulted in a severe drop in vaccinations.
“I welcome the fact that it’s now been retracted and hopefully everybody should now be absolutely reassured about the safety of the vaccine,” Dr Kevin Kelleher, head of health protection with the HSE, said.
Dr Kelleher said it was “very unfortunate” that the research had ever been published. “As a direct consequence in the early part of the last decade we had a major outbreak of measles, with well over 1,000 cases and three deaths associated with it,” he said.
“We were pushing up our rates [MMR immunisation rates] in the 1990s and by 2000 we were up to an 80 per cent uptake. And then it dropped back to 69 per cent nationally and went down to 50 per cent in some parts of the country,” he said, adding that there was a 10-year cohort of children who have been under-vaccinated as a result.
However, vaccination rates have improved since the research was discredited. “It’s taken us another decade to get back up to 89 per cent uptake rates and we should hit 90 per cent this year hopefully,” Dr Kelleher said.
The Lancet retracted the research following a judgment by the General Medical Council’s fitness to practise panel last Thursday, which found several elements of the 1998 paper by Dr Andrew Wakefield and others were incorrect. The medical journal’s editor, Richard Horton, said he realised as soon as he read the GMC findings that the paper had to be retracted. “It was utterly clear, without any ambiguity at all, that the statements in the paper were utterly false,” he said. “He deceived the journal.”
In its ruling the GMC said the authors “showed a callous disregard” for the suffering of children and subjected some youngsters to unnecessary tests.
The HSE has reiterated calls to parents, particularly those in the northwest, to ensure their children are vaccinated against measles following outbreaks in parts of the country. In January alone there were 135 cases of measles in Ireland in comparison with 164 cases in the whole of 2009. – (Additional reporting: Guardian Service, PA)