Submitted by Rebecca, class of 2011:
MMR is a vaccine used to protect children against measles, mumps and rubella. In the 1998 a paper was written and published in the medical journal Lancet that connected the MMR vaccine to autism. This scared lots of parents and they stopped taking their kids in to get the vaccine; which then caused outbreaks of said diseases. Even though the article was retracted parents still fear the connection between the two. Journalist Brian Deer did some digging on the supposed study that Andrew Wakefield did in order to write the article. Deer found that while Wakefield said that the 12 children he tested were normal and had not preexisting conditions that this was in fact not the case at all, five had previously documented developmental problems and all of the medical files were altered and didn’t match up to what the parents said about their children. While not very many professionals believed the study Deer’s discovery really cleared things up. Some parents will probably still shy away from the MMR vaccine even though there is no connection between it and Autism.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/01/05/health/AP-EU-MED-Autism-Fraud.html
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