My oldest is 20 and received the MMR as a child. There is a lot of controversy with this one-there has to be something to it, although the odds of autism must not be too high since its till around. Flu shots are another one (though not as serious). So many people claim they get ill after receiving one but it is claimed its impossible.

Autism is such a broad term now. There are so many different levels and types of diagnosis' under the Autism umbrella. I have a hard time blaming it on Vaccines..it does seem that many kids begin to display around the time vaccines are given..I think it's more that the awareness of ones child not hitting milestones is around that time.

I know that many Autism "quirks" can be diminished with a better diet, removal of many toxic or toxic to the body like substances. I also think you can train some children to over come some of them too.

So in essence..for some those vaccines are toxic, and could have triggered issues.

I vaccinated my children according to the rules our state mandates towards public school enrollment. I do not vaccinate them for everything. I believe that a healthy body has more benefit to them.

Only one has ever had antibiotics. And he's had them just 2x in his 21 years.
We do not get the flu..and colds are mild.

I live in an area where there are a lot of untraditional vaccinated children. They use homepathic or natural "vaccines". It's their choice...some "unvaccinated" children are "Autistic" too.

Scissors, MMR has been used for 42 years now

"A licensed vaccine to prevent measles first became available in 1963, an improved measles vaccine in 1968. Vaccines for the mumps and rubella (German measles) became available in 1967 and 1969, respectively. The three vaccines (for mumps, measles, and rubella) were combined in 1971 to become the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine.

The MMR vaccine is generally administered to children around the age of one year, with a second dose before starting school (i.e. age 4/5). The second dose is a dose to produce immunity in the small number of persons (2 - 5%) who fail to develop measles immunity after the first dose. In the United States, the vaccine was licensed in 1971 and the second dose was introduced in 1989. It is widely used around the world; since introduction of its earliest versions in the 1970s, over 500 million doses have been used in over 60 countries"

This whole false brouhaha was started as the result of an English physician (who has since lost his license) publishing a study on a VERY small group (10 or 12 individuals) and which has since been withdrawn from the medical literature for cause.
The link below is the abstract of an article in current medical literature which supplies an outline of the topic.

Those individuals who don't vaccinate their children have never seen what those diseases can do. Moreover, you are exposing people at risk of infection (including infants too young to be vaccinated). You are riding on the concept of herd immunity, in other words, all those who have been vaccinated, to keep your children safe.

Here is a link that might be useful: The vaccine-autism connection: a public health crisis caused by unethical medical practices and fraudulent science

Leel is absolutely correct - the original study was deeply flawed and should never had been published due to lack of rigorous scientific protocols. Wakefield lost his medical license and his research was not only incorrect it was unethical.

As the article linked points out - the diagnosis of autism is devastating to parents who are desperate to find out what caused it. Unfortunately there isn't a definite answer which adds to the hysteria.

My children are up to date on all their vaccines. DH is a hematologist/oncologist and we know many, many physicians, nurses and health care providers. I've had this conversation with many of them and they all had their children vaccinated.

Here is a link that might be useful: Wakefield

Leel is spot on. MMR vaccine has nothing to do with Autism and children need to be vaccinated. There is a current outbreak of measles right now in Texas among church members who decided to not vaccinate their children. Well now that they are all catching measles the church is holding the vaccine clinics and urging parents to vaccinate their children. I do genealogy and believe me the world before vaccines was not a world you would want to live in. I don't believe one single family I researched had all their children live. Some parents lost more than half of their children to diseases we can now prevent. What those parents would have given for an opportunity to have their children vaccinated and protected is just mind boggling to me. It's probably useless to try to convince anyone though so I just hope those children who are not vaccinated are lucky enough to live with other children who are and have some protection from herd immunity.
Joann

There was something a few days ago on our local news about them having identified the lack of some group of enzymes as a potential cause for autism. It seems like some new idea is offered on a fairly regular basis.

The MMR vaccine/autism link has been debunked over and over again! And now children are dying from measles.

So yes, occasionally, a child will have a bad reaction to a vaccine. Usually it's a fever or a rash, and it's no big deal.

From the Center for Disease Control site:

"Severe Problems (Very Rare)

Serious allergic reaction (less than 1 out of a million doses)
Several other severe problems have been reported after a child gets MMR vaccine, including:
Deafness
Long-term seizures, coma, or lowered consciousness
Permanent brain damage

These are so rare that it is hard to tell whether they are caused by the vaccine."

See?? LESS THAN 1 OUT OF A MILLION DOSES!

Vaccinate your children!!!

I will also add that I am old enough to not only remember those diseases but, with the exception ( thank goodness) of polio, to have had them all: measles, mumps, chicken pox (2x--2nd time as an adult) , whooping cough , and German measles in my thirties. Not a fun thing at all, and I was fortunate to escape the complications that are Possible and even more serious for adults.

Vaccinate your children, both for their safety and the public at large. No man (or child) is an island.

My three children received all their vaccines and I definitely believe all cases of Autism can't be attributed to childhood vaccines. In fact, when the 'Autism might be linked to vaccines' theories all started, I strongly urged everyone I knew to continue vaccinating their children because of the danger these diseases can bring to unvaccinated children.

However, when my own children entered secondary school, I began working at a Daycare. In the 17 years I worked there, I personally witnessed two children (not related) who had been bright, active, verbal children, suddenly begin losing their vocabulary, within 48 hours of being vaccinated. I'm talking going from about 100/150 word vocabulary, to being able to say less than 10 words within about two weeks.

These two children lost interest in things they had previously enjoyed, would no longer engage in play and even stopped making eye contact when spoken to, which was very disturbing. In both cases the parents suspected the vaccine, as their children had become very inconsolable in the hours after the shot (unlike their previous vaccines which caused no reaction) and their 'strange' symptoms followed so quickly.

One child made remarkable progress after a year of intense therapy and today seems happy, is intelligent and holds a decent job. He is rather reserved and somewhat less socially/emotionally engaged with others than your average person, but seems otherwise 'normal.'

The other child unfortunately was more severely affected and did not make great strides even with therapy and dietary changes. He never recovered his speech or social/emotional connectivity to other people and remains severely autistic.

Do I still believe in vaccines? Absolutely. They save millions of lives. Do I still insist that Autism is just something a child would have developed at that age, even if they hadn't been vaccinated? No. One only need witness firsthand, a child lose almost all their vocabulary within two days of being vaccinated to believe that it CAN happen. It baffles me that the studies will publish the rare side effects of "lowered consciousness and permanent brain damage" which basically IS the very best description of Autism, but they still refuse to use the tabu "A" word itself!

Numerous scientific studies now acknowledge the sudden increase in Guillain Barre Syndrome occuring in some patients who received the Swine Flu shot in 1976 and in some people who received the 2009/10 H1N1 flu shots. They confirmed that previously assumed 'fail-safe' flu shots were directly responsible for the development of Guillain Barre to a minority of people who were sensitive to the components in the vaccine. My cousin was one of them. He survived after being on a respirator for a month and having to relearn how to talk, walk, eat, etc.

I still want my grandchildren vaccinated, and I still get my flu shots. But I now no longer preach to others about getting vaccinated, because I couldn't take the guilt if their child happened to be one of the very few children who developed Autisim as a result, or their child/spouse/parent developed Guillain Barre from a flu shot. I still believe that the odds are so greatly against an adverse reaction. But now I say a prayer before and after every shot.

YES to leel's post. My daughter is a psychologist who has worked with autistic kids for 10 years. She keeps up on the data. And she had kept up to date with her 2 year old and just turned 1 year old's vaccinations. Her older brother has Asperger's Syndrome (high functioning autism.)

I tend to be suspicious of a lot of things modern medicine comes up with (they have a history of unpleasant long-term surprises), but my work as a volunteer gravestone photographer has given me a real respect for vaccines. Walk through an old cemetery and you'll be stunned at the number of children wiped out by illnesses we vaccinate for today. Often families lost more than one in the same week, or even the same day. Horrible.

As for autism, it seems clear that we're doing something now that we didn't do in the past. Or, conversely, failing to do something that used to be done routinely. My own personal suspect is frequent ultrasounds.

A second dose was... blah blah in 1989. You know why don't you? The earlier vaccine failed. I had to have it twice! Whether I liked it or not. I couldn't get my grades from university in 1989 until I did get re-vaccinated. Unfortunately, I was pregnant. Even then, I wasn't exmpt from the vaccine?! I had to wait until I wasn't pregnant.