Callous Disregard: Autism and Vaccines: The Truth Behind a Tragedy [Hardcover]

Reading this book was not easy for me as it made me extremely angry. I am a parent of an autistic boy and our experience matches many of the examples and cases outlined within the book. Firstly I must make it clear we have never sought to attribute blame for our son's autism or have taken any legal action regarding the MMR debate. What we have done as parents is concentrate all our efforts on strategies that work in helping our son develop hopefully into what one day will be some form of independence.

Our Son developed perfectly for the first 18 months of his life meeting all the milestones you would expect. He started talking early and was an absolute joy to be around. Always laughing and very rarely upset. However 2 days after the MMR injection after being unwell and having a high temperature he had a seizure at home. At one point his eyes rolled up into his head. At this point we immediately took him to see an emergency doctor. While in the waiting room he regained conciousness and seemed OK again and the doctor showed little concern at what we had experienced.

Over the subsequent weeks our son withdrew into himself. All speech and eye contact stopped and he would spend several hours a day just screaming uncontrolably. He also went from a normal sleep pattern to just a couple hours a night. The net effect on him and the family was terrible. This went on for a few years and the medical professionals could not offer any real help. Then my wife found out how bowel conditions can potentially lead to severe autistic problems and with the help of a number of parents, the net and certain experts in this area we were able to develop a regime that helped our son.

Today he is still autistic we have not found any miracle cure. But he has good eye contact, is very loving, sleeps well (up to 10 hours per night) and can talk and his language ability is still improving. There is now hope for him but we still have a long way to go.

The reason I am sharing this information with you all in a book review is the research that Andrew Wakefield conducted with a number of other professionals is vital to fully investigate and understand the link between the bowel and the autistic brain irrespective if the MMR is the cause of the problem. There are 100's if not 1000's of parents of autistic children out there who have seen first hand and recognise the benefits in overcoming the bowel problems our children face and the resulting lessening of many of the most severe autistic behaviours. The BMA and all the relevent authorities by taking the actions they did against Wakefield have basically stopped all meaningful research into this area. No medical professional out there would now touch this subject with a bargepole in fear of losing their medical license and career. What were the authorities so frightened of? Wakefield in his paper for the Lancet stated that there to-date was no medical evidence to show a link between MMR and this bowel condition.

I feel that money and politics have taken over the debate rather than finding the answers we all need as parents as to why perfect children regressed so dramatically at the age of 18 months to 2 years. If not due to the MMR, serious research is needed to understand what was the cause and what strategies can be used for treatment. All that is left now is parents grouping together and using information of people like Andrew Wakefield to follow strategies independently without any help from the medical establishment. Surely this is morally wrong in every way.

Finally I must add to set a National Newspaper reporter on Andrew Wakefield and to use him to draw up the evidence used at the BMA hearing is unbelieveable. The reporter in question I believe has no medical training and his reports were inaccurate at every level. The facts were wrong and distorted in a terrible way. In my opinion such behaviour where childrens health is at risk is far more serious than the recent Newspaper phone hacking scandal. It is also interesting to note that the reporter in question works for News International the owner of the Sunday Times. I have also read somewhere that the head James Murdock of News International is a non executive director of Glaxo Smith Kliene one of the manufacturers of the MMR. If true this really is alarming.

Andrew Wakefield states in his book that although his work and this vital research has been stopped there will be no hiding from this problem as Nature cannot be fooled and will always present itself. I sincerely hopes this is the case and this man who has now lost everything for standing up for something he thought was right is finally vindicated and allowed to continue with his medical career.

Excellent book giving the science in detail, but well written in a style which can be understood by the lay person.

Note that the science has NOT been shown to be wrong. The science has NOT been disproved. Andrew Wakefield discovered something genuinely new and ground breaking which connects a particular condition with a vaccine which is intended to be protective of health, and mostly is. Occasionally however, the system fails and as a civilised society, we need to care compassonately for those who have been betrayed by these intentions.

Read about the political machinations involved in helping the drug companies to help themselves to tax payers cash while the poor patient is last in the pecking order of concerns. Shame on the politicians involved in this charade.

The drugs industry needs to be reined in and better controlled because their concern is profits, not patient health. Beware the next Hep C vaccine, intended to be given to newborns. Beware also of the new health economics, where the UK economy is to be based on scientific and medical research, which need to be tested on us, the public.

There have been many wonderful advances in medical science. But make yourself aware about issues such as ethics, patient rights and patient consent. Don't let yourself or your children be the subject of a tragedy such as this book describes.

The government, GMC and Sunday Times seem bent on removing Andrew Wakefield and his work from the medical record, in a manner unparallel in the UK but not unlike the way Stalin purged his critics from Soviet history. The Sunday Times accuses Wakefield of 'fixing' his findings, the GMC of serious professional misconduct, the DoH of lowering MMR uptake and increasing measles outbreaks. And one by one his published works are retracted by leading scientific journals. His many detractors speak with one voice that the GMC's removal of his medical license is justly-deserved and long-overdue. Yet if ever there was a story needing to be told to counter this grand narrative then 'Callous Disregard' is it.

Wakefield provides a robust and cogent rebuttal, always factually based, of the wide-ranging attacks against him. Chapters focus on the validity of the 1998 Lancet paper (which the GMC claimed was not ethically approved); the press conference where Wakefield advised parents to opt for the three separate vaccines, then available on the NHS, instead of the MMR; the machinations of senior managers at the Royal Free Hospital; Wakefield's research on behalf of autistic children litigating against MMR manufacturers and whether this amounted to undisclosed conflict of interest. Much of the GMC evidence is now available on public websites for people to decide for themselves if Wakefield's detractors and the GMC are right.

The implications of the 'Wakefield affair' extend way beyond the bounds of medical research to cover medical ethics, the role of medical regulators and policymakers, vaccine safety and what really lies behind the rise in autism. This book gives Wakefield's own account of this wide-ranging controversy that has ensnared him, which he does without trace of bitterness but with a detached sense of irony.

Whilst his detractors claim yet again that Wakefield's professional career is over and the MMR safe, it is likely that the controversy will continue. This book will certainly play a part in this. But more important is the wider story behind the book of the unending growth in the numbers of children now diagnosed as autistic and the mounting costs of their social, educational and medical care that sooner or later will demand a public inquiry into what is causing this epidemic, with its tragic consequences for one in a hundred UK families.