I don’t know my status but I will check.

There are toddlers whose preferred media input centres around The Weebles and anything with silly accents and brightly-coloured houses who display greater media savvy than LBC 97.3 and Global Radio. If I were their shareholders I’d be asking why they didn’t have a proper damage-limitation plan.

Can’t think how they thought deleting was going to work. Actually, that’s their problem – can’t think.

They should talk to Goldacre and Yasmin and ask them onto the radio to give some correct guidance.

This dreadful scourge has almost been eliminated from the developed world by infant and childhood vaccination programmes. The vaccine is unusually effective, with seroconversion rates of as much as 98%, and long lasting persistence. It appears to be very safe, even when given to women who become pregnant shortly after the vaccination. However, paradoxically, this can place the population at greater risk if vaccination rates subsequently fall: a disease which was endemic can then become epidemic.

Epidemic risks are increased by the fact that the disease itself is often mild both in adults and in children. If it is undiagnosed, then sufferers may not be isolated from pregnant women. Some children remain infective for long periods after the symptoms have disappeared, and in the nature of things, young children are often in the same company as pregnant women.

Reduced MMR uptake poses just such a risk. Given that no plausible evidence has been produced to suggest that the vaccine poses risks to child development, and that there is no possibility of doubting that the disease poses devastating risks to child development, I think it is tragic and regrettable that misguided parents are campaigning against MMR. When they have a child with a developmental disorder themselves, they are then in the position of campaigning for the promotion of developmental defects in others. In my opinion, ill informed media journalists, like Jeni Barnett, and pressure groups like JABS, must bear a significant share of responsibility for cases of CRS occurring over the next 10 or 20 years.

References: too many to cite, really, but see for example Duszak RS (2009) Congenital rubella syndrome – major review. Optometry 80: 36-43, and Robinson JL et al (2006) Prevention of congenital rubella syndrome – what makes sense in 2006? Epidemiologic Reviews 28: 81-87.

Admin edit: quickly – thank you so much for this. Somewhere I have a stack of references on Sense and CRS but I could only find a couple and they weren’t right up to date – unlike the material you cite. We’ve edited to make the citations clickable. Thank you.

We’ve post links to the issue of vaccine safety in several posts but refer interested readers to the latest article by Jeffrey Gerber and Paul Offit: Vaccines and Autism: A Tale of Shifting Hypotheses and to AP Gaylard who has produced an online version of some of the material concerning in Offit’s book, Autism’s False Prophets.