Doctors at centre of vaccine controversy could lose licences

A British doctor whose research into the alleged link between a children's vaccine and autism faces hearings Monday into charges of professional misconduct.

Britain's General Medical Council will hear allegations that gastroenterologist Dr. Andrew Wakefield and two colleagues John Walker-Smith and Simon Murch behaved unethically in conducting their research into the MMR (measles mumps rubella) vaccine.

The hearings, expected to last 15 weeks, could result in them losing their medical licences.

Evidence will centre on research published in 1998 in the prestigious British medical journal, the Lancet, in which they claimed a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. MMR is a combined vaccine against measles, mumps and rubella, three common childhood infectious diseases, and replaces single vaccines for each disease.

The General Medical Council hearings will not examine whether MMR is safe. Its focus is the professional conduct of Wakefield and his colleagues.

The council will hear evidence about whether they failed to get proper ethical approval for their research, and then carried out procedures on children that had not been sanctioned by the ethics committee.

It is alleged that some of the children who took part did not qualify for the study on the basis of their behavioural symptoms, the BBC reports.

The council will also look into charges Wakefield advised lawyers representing children claiming to have suffered harm because of the vaccination.

The 1998 study sparked heated debate among researchers around the world and caused a decline in MMR vaccinations as parents feared the possibility it could lead to autism.Autism is a developmental condition causing physical, social and learning problems.

Some parents had their children vaccinated using single vaccines for each disease while others decided not to vaccinate their children for any of these diseases.

Health experts in the United Kingdom say vaccination numbers have not yet recovered to the level seen before Wakefield's study, according to Reuters.

Dr. David Scheifele, a vaccine expert at B.C. Children's Hospital in Vancouver, dismisses Wakefield's research as "nonsense."

"It shouldn't have been published in Lancet," says Scheifele.

"It's very interesting how important the responsibility is to speak carefully about risk because one paper can just poison so much thinking," says Dr. Joanne Langley, a pediatric infectious diseases specialist at Halifax's IWK Health Centre.

Wakefield stands by study

In the nearly 10 years since the Lancet publication, scads of studies costing untold millions of dollars have failed to corroborate the link Wakefield still insists exists. Scientific authorities such as the U.S. Institute of Medicine have flatly concluded that Wakefield and his co-authors were wrong.

The Canadian Pediatric Society announced in June 2001 there was no evidence MMR was a health risk for children and that it was safe to give. The statement is backed by the World Health Organization.

"I actually feel enormously sad that this has been allowed to go on as long as it has. I think that there's been an enormous amount of wasted effort pursuing a theory that is based on flawed science," says Dr. Brian Ward, an infectious diseases expert at Montreal's McGill University who was approached by Wakefield but declined to work with him.

In 2004, 10 of Wakefield's 12 collaborators retracted the Lancet study.

"We wish to make it clear that in this paper no causal link was established between MMR vaccine and autism, as the data were insufficient," wrote the group. "However, the possibility of such a link was raised. Consequent events have had major implications for public health."

At one point MMR vaccination rates sunk to 75 per cent in Britain, well below the 95 per cent authorities say is needed to keep these diseases from circulating.

While the rate has since climbed to about 85 per cent, Britain continues to suffer outbreaks of these three diseases and to seed the diseases abroad. The mumps outbreak that Nova Scotia and a few other provinces have been fighting since mid-winter seems to trace back to a case from Britain.

The Public Health Agency of Canada says MMR vaccination rates in this country hovered around the 95 per cent rate throughout the period from 1997 to 2004, though no data were collected from 1998 to 2001.