Word: wakefields
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...there were other lapses in the way Wakefield recruited research participants: in one instance, he paid children about $8 apiece at his son's birthday party to give blood. The General Medical Council also concluded that Wakefield had unnecessarily carried out invasive procedures on some of the children in the 1998 study, including spinal taps and colonoscopies, without ethical approval...
...Wakefield and the other two doctors cited by the Medical Council may be stripped of their right to practice medicine in Britain. But the conclusion of the investigation comes several years after the 1998 study had already been widely discredited and after the other 10 co-authors had publicly rejected its findings...
...with the Lancet's formal retraction of Wakefield's paper, the question is whether the vaccine theory of autism may finally be put to rest. But that seems unlikely. Since 1998, numerous studies have found no link between vaccines and autism, yet parents' fears have endured. Indeed, vaccination rates in the U.K., which dropped after the publication of Wakefield's paper, never fully rebounded, and measles cases later took off. The number of cases has also risen...
Another reason that Wakefield's spurious conclusions had so much staying power was that his study focused on gastrointestinal symptoms in children with autism. Many autistic children have chronic constipation, diarrhea, stomach pain and feeding issues--problems that remain poorly understood. Says autism advocate and blogger Katie Wright, a Wakefield loyalist: "He was the first doctor to take this concern seriously and research why so many autistic children develop severe GI disease...
...Wakefield, who is associated with the Thoughtful House Center for Children, an autism center in Austin, Texas, could not be reached for comment. He maintains a devoted circle of supporters, several of whom appeared with him on Jan. 28 in London for the General Medical Council ruling. The formal repudiation of his 1998 paper may only reinforce their belief that there's a conspiracy on the part of the medical establishment to suppress his work...